We crazy people are sublime and loyal.

Spy vs. Spy artist Antonio Prohias explaining to Miami New Times reporter Diane Montane that he went straight to MAD magazine with his portfolio after arriving in New York from Cuba in 1960 because of ‘that crazy name’. (From the recently published Spy vs. Spy Omnibus.)

Writing a novel – actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs – is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV’s so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it’s damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit.

How I Became A Famous Novelist by Steve Hely, page 73

Pharmacists live in minutiae… Ask anyone who has ever filled the innards of a tiny gelatin capsule with a drug, and they will know that twenty grains equals one scruple. Three scruples equal one dram apothecaries. Eight drams apothecaries equal one ounce apothecaries, which equals four hundred eighty grains, or twenty-four scruples.

[…] It was funny — a scruple, by itself, was a misgiving; make it plural and it suddenly was a set of principles, of ethics. […] You only had to survive one of your regrets, and it was enough to make you realize you’d been living your life all wrong.

‘Weights and Measures’ by Jodi Picoult, in Stories: All New Tales edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, page 143

Why is blank verse such a promising medium for dialogue? Probably it is because the form conveys a slight height­ening to the material through its recurrent sound-patterns, holding our attention without distracting us by its artifice. Our attention thus engaged, we are reminded of the collab­or­at­ively creative nature of conver­sation, which is human drama in itself… Even if the language (of blank verse) is collo­quial, the meter formalizes it and, in the way of many esthetic devices, entices us even as it distances us from the dialogue we are overhearing. We are carried by the rhythms as the speakers are. Because each speaker sustains similar rhythms, we feel the intensity of their connection to each other: they are in some sense on the same wavelength, even if what they are exchanging is mottled with misun­der­standings. Their speech is the way they reveal themselves, and blank verse, in its unobtrusive though stylized way, draws our attention to disclosures of character.

Blank verse: a guide to its history and use by Robert B. Shaw, page 7

In his father’s slumping shoulders, in the expres­sions that flitted across his weathered features, Quinn saw something of their family’s terrible story, the way wind was visible when it ruffled a field of wheat.

Bereft by Chris Womersley, pages 103–4

There’s one of Shadow’s pieces, a painting on a crumbling wall of a heart cracked by earth­quake… It’s not a heart like you see on a Valentine’s Day card. It’s the heart how it really is: fine veins and atriums and arteries. A fist-sized forest in our chest.

Graffiti Moon by Cath Crowley, page 2

(Alice) had many friends among the children of the village, for she was bold and quick-witted… She was often punished… but she took her whippings as a proud child does, as the inevitable conclusion to a fine adventure.

The Midnight Zoo by Sonya Hartnett, page 55

…there it was, reflected back at him: the inside of his belly, etched in blocks and lines of black against the fluoro­scope screen’s sickly calcium-white, suspended in a void that detached it from anything and everything. Organs, tubes and bones quivered and oscil­lated against each other awkwardly, like animals — reptiles, molluscs, nether-dwelling creatures — who, crammed together in a space too small for them, bristle with aggression towards one another yet under­stand, through some vermi­cular, primordial instinct, that the survival of each depends on that of its unwanted neighbours.

C by Tom McCarthy