"Be a Sadist."

Rule #6 on Kurt Vonnegut's 8 rules for writing a short story: No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful thing...

"But people love badgers."

"This is not a campaign against some kind of airborne creepy-crawly, spreading disease as it feeds on the blood of poor, innocent cows....

"Composite?"/"Compost heap's more like it."

We were watching "A Face in the Crowd " last night. TMC was making a night of Andy Griffith films, and I settled in to watch the E...

"Worse still than real dreams, mine or yours—sandier mouthfuls, ranker lies—are the dreams of characters in books and movies."

Writes Michael Chabon: Nobody, not even Aunt Em, wants to hear about Dorothy’s dream when she wakes up at the end of The Wizard of Oz . As o...

"Reading fiction is important."

"It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lin...

"Metaphors like 'The singer had a velvet voice' and 'He had leathery hands' roused the sensory cortex..."

"... while phrases matched for meaning, like 'The singer had a pleasing voice' and 'He had strong hands,' did not....

"When I read a book, I'm handling a specific object in a specific time and place."

"The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that's reassuring." Jonathan Franzen worries ...

Writing with dashes.

Do you like dashes? I do. There are certain ways of using dashes that I particularly admire. Rather than try to explain what I like so much,...

"I felt that women betraying each other was something I was investigating at the time."

Said Tori Amos , explaining the origin of the song "Cornflake Girl": The idea of that, and how quote-unquote friends can really hu...

"Sotheby's to sell real drawing by fake artist."

"The London auction house said Monday it is offering a drawing by the talented but fictional American abstract expressionist Nat Tate....

"I spent a lot of time thinking about contemporary Christianity, and obviously the rapture kept coming up."

"My first impulse was ... to laugh it off — it's sort of a funny idea, people just floating away. But I kept thinking: What if it d...

What if you soul-searched over an event that — you learn later — didn't happen?

Pity France , which self-critiqued over the Strauss-Kahn case that now seems not to have been what it once appeared to be. His arrest... led...

In the violent video games case, Scalia notes the irony of Alito's strenuous effort to describe the "astounding" violence.

From the majority opinion in the just-decided case of Brown, Governor of California v. Entertainment Merchants Association: JUSTICE ALITO ha...

Philip Roth: "I've stopped reading fiction. I don't read it at all."

"I read other things: history, biography. I don't have the same interest in fiction that I once did.... I wised up ..."

Why would the No Child Left Behind emphasis on math and reading leave less time to learn history?

I'm reading this Wall Street Journal article about new history history test scores: The overall lackluster performance is certain to re...

People who believed in the "Gay Girl in Damascus" need to explain why they believed this person was real and not fictional.

I'm not interested in the 40-year-old man who pretended to be young, Syrian, and lesbian. I'm interested in how intelligent people ...

Recreating an old reality show, with actors playing the parts of the real people...

... who once lived their supposedly real lives in front of the cameras. Is this something we want to watch now, or do we feel sorry for act...

The reason to read fiction: to engage with the mind of someone who isn't trying to sell you anything.

Argues Lorrie Moore (who's not saluting but having trouble keeping the light out of her eyes): I love the idea that what we want from re...

"The Call of Cthulhu in Under 2 Minutes."

"I like that Lovecraft's brand of cosmic horror can be summarized as humanity being 'way harshly insignificant.'"

"Facebook has no charms for me. It looks inward. Twitter looks outward..."

From an essay by Roger Ebert about how the internet rewires our brains . A lot of the essay is about the importance of stepping away from th...