I jotted the name down mentally on that tattered notepad I call a memory. The pen skipped. - Jonathan Lethem

Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence? Detective stories always have too many characters anyway. And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone.

The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time *isn't*.

I'm tightly wound. I'm a loose cannon. Both - I'm a tightly wound loose cannon, a tight loose.