"I never start with an idea. I always see something. I start with an image, a cigarette being put out in a jar of mustard, for instance, or the remains, the wreckage, of a dinner left on the table. Pop cans in the fireplace, that sort of thing. And a feeling goes with that. And that feeling seems to transport me back to that particular time and place, and the ambience of time. But it is the image, and the emotion that goes with that image - that's what's important."
-Raymond Carver

"Well, I almost said to the old man, you said that the physical was never cause, but a chocolate bar is physical and look what it's causing, for to look at that face you might think it was a bite of Jesus and not a slug of Hershey's had done it. And you going to tell the difference, huh?"
-Robert Penn Warren

The tiny madman in his padded cell.... - Lolita

Let any lady who is inclined to be hard on Mrs. Cadwallader inquire into the comprehensiveness of he own beautiful views, and be quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have the honour to coexist with hers. - Middlemarch

Make the reader laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured. - Somerset Maugham

Old Jerome was a boardwalk. Everybody knows that the world is supported by the shoulders of Atlas; and that Atlas stands on a rail-fence; and that the rail-fence is built on a turtle's back. Now, the turtle has to stand on something; and that is a board-walk made of men like old Jerome.- O. Henry

He was a very good-looking young man indeed, shaped to be annoyed. His voice was intimate as the rustle of sheets, and he kissed easily. - Dorothy Parker

There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more I am dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms by belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit of sense. - Jane Austen

What liars and poets everybody were! they made one think one wanted sentiment. When what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality. To find a man who dared to do it, without shame or sin or final misgiving! If he had been ashamed afterwards, and made one feel ashamed, how awful! What a pity most men are so doggy.....Both sensually a bit doggy and humiliating. The supreme pleasure of the mind! And what is that to a woman? What is it, really, to the man either! He becomes merely messy and doggy, even in his mind. It needs sheer sensuality even to purify and quicken the mind. Sheer fiery sensuality, not messiness. - Lady Chatterly's Lover

Lorraine, who disturesed John's wife in the same way that she distrusted the heroines of all the novels she'd read, cast a suspicious glance at Gordon....[she] had had a dream about him once in which he seemed to exist in or as a dirty puddle on the floor, and she'd awakened with the realization that there was something sinister about the photographer that generally went unrecognized. - John's Wife

Waves don't even get overly excited about offshore drilling. Occasionally, they may wash a little blood and dead fish on the beach, just as a reminder of how things really are. But, primarily, waves are cynics biding time. - Slow Dancing on Dinosaur Bones