Once I was King of the Titans. Now I need a MedicAlert bracelet and a subscription to the Safe Return program. Can you put out a Silver Alert on a god? I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world "postmodernist.

I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

Careless and not particularly biting, it was easier to shrug off than anything in the first book which depicted me as an inarticulate zombie confused by the irony of Randy Newman's "I Love L.A.

Find your self love. Find that precious thing inside you thatmakes you want to live. And when you’ve found it, hold on to it with onehand, and use the other to claw your way back home.-Ripple

My new story collection won’t please everyone, nor was it meant to. Then again, not everybody lives in my world. If they did, I’d have to move out and find another world to write about.

I write fiction not for my readers and not for myself. I write fiction for the sake of those odd heroic characters that are contained therein. They are counting on me as much as I am counting on them.

Last, but not least -- in fact, this is most important -- you need a happy ending. However, if you can create tragic situations and jerk a few tears before the happy ending, it will work much better.

Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible.

We want to believe that this life is longer than it is, but in the grand scheme of the universe our existence equals the amount of time it takes a warm breeze to blow through your hair on a spring day.

Thanks to Dashiell Hammett. "He was thin, walked with a stick, and was the only private dick I knew who used the pockets of his sport coat. Maybe that means something, maybe not." Ramone Ramone, 2013

One wrong social move---say---like hanging with the wrong person,” she said nastily, “Can make your life around here a living nightmare and I definitely don’t think that you want that.

That's sounds right. Another $5,000 went to dress up the Little League park where he had played so many games. Seems like he paid off the MORTAGE on his parents' home, which wasn't that much.

Woe is the mind of the common man, so easily controlled by the prospect of an ambition never to be truly attained. This is what tyrants live on and by what commoners are blissfully burdened and subdued.