"Ed says, 'So are you going to tell me a story?'
"Starlight says, 'That's what I'm here for. But usually the guy wants to know what I'm wearing.'
"Ed says, 'I want to hear a story about a cheerleader and the Devil.'
"Bones says, 'So what's she wearing?'
"Pete says, 'Make it a story that goes backwards.'
"Jeff says, 'Put something scary in it.'
"Alibi says, 'Sexy.'
"Brenner says, 'I want it to be about good and evil and true love, and it should also be funny. No talking animals. Not too much fooling around with narrative structure. The ending should be happy but still realistic, believable, you know, and there shouldn't be a moral although we should be able to think back later and have some sort of revelation. No and suddenly they woke up and discovered that it was all a dream. Got that?'
"Starlight says, 'Okay. The Devil and a cheerleader. Got it. Okay.'"
--Kelly Link, "Lull," Magic for Beginners
"And weirdly, [Mötley Crüe's autobiography] The Dirt isn't a bad book. For a start, it's definitive, if you're looking for the definitive book on vile, abusive, misogynistic behavior: if there are any worse stories than this in rock and roll, they aren't worth telling, because the human mind would not be capable of comprehending them without the aid of expert gynecological and pharmaceutical assistance....
"Oh, but what do any of these things matter? Is it really possible that Mötley Crüe have destroyed all the literature in the world, everything that came before them, and everything written since? I rather fear it is."
--Nick Hornby, "Stuff I've Been Reading," The Believer, April 2006
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From John Fowles's novella "The Ivory Tower," which I'm just finishing, here are a married painter's musings on a nearly pursued affair:
"Underlying all this there stood the knowledge that he would not change; he would go on painting as before, he would forget this day, he would find reasons to interpret everything differently, as a transient losing his head, a self-indulgent folly. A scar would grow over it, then fall away, and the skin would be as if there had never been a wound. He was crippled by common sense, he had no ultimate belief in chance and its exploitation, the missed opportunity would become the finally sensible decision, the decent thing; the flame of deep fire that had singed him a dream, a moment's illusion; her reality just one more unpursued idea kept among old sketchbooks at the back of a studio cupboard."
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