Quotes from Benjamin Percy

Not long ago scientists figured out a way to create mathematical constructs of patients' hearts.

A meeting from 3 years ago led to an opportunity this month. A failed feature pitch from 2 years ago recently found new life in a different medium. A script I couldn't sell led to me working in animation. Writing is a long hustle, I'm saying, and "No," sometimes means, "Not now.

Crows gather in a tree barren of leaves and make its branches appear heavy with some black, poisonous fruit.

a black site, a night chapel, spoiled land, a kind of charging station for evil. "They're all over the place. The Paris catacombs, Guantánamo Bay, Lake Powell, the Bellagio, the House on the Rock, the Golden Gate Bridge." There are at least two others in Oregon alone. The Rajneesh compound and the Lava River Cave.

Or are you exclusively "artful" because it's easier to excuse your sloppiness as purposeful?

people who read short stories love endings that make them want to gargle with Drano or nosedive off a skyscraper. But

I would encourage subtlety. Nabokov's bubble gum or Munro's water over Dumbo's magic feather.

Maybe Virginia Woolf thought about going to the lighthouse, but I doubt she ever got there, or the novel might have ended differently.

So you could write what you know. The problem, of course, is that some people don't know shit.

Transformation is forbidden.

Matters of the heart make your world worth occupying.

A-B-D-C-E structure of a story, an acronym for Action-Background-Development-Conflict-Ending.

Don't forget the most basic reason we read: to discover what happens next. Make certain your devotion to pretty sentences and flesh-and-blood characters and cityscapes and exquisitely crafted metaphors works in service of story, contributing to the momentum that will propel your readers forward.

Realism is the trend.

The seagull doesn't mean anything," I said. "It's just a seagull. It's there for beach ambience.

Violence defines humanity and determines headlines and elections and borders, the whole world boiled down to who hits whom harder.

A violência é o que define a humanidade, é ela que determina manchetes, decide eleições e estabelece fronteiras; o mundo inteiro se reduz à questão de quem bate em quem com mais força.

What matters is hunger. Appetite. In this way I have become what I behold.

They wear masks that hide how hairy they are on the inside.

The letting of blood, for him, like the letting of semen.

When you let the camera linger, when you crowd a scene with details, you are announcing that everything is important, and if you do this constantly, then you are also saying that everything is important, and when everything is important, nothing is important.

The world is a sewer of lies. We're all up to our necks in the sweet shit of it.

Lycans are human.

Fight back. Bite back.