Every last minute of my life has been preordained and I'm sick and tired of it. How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after the Dark Ages. ... The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Postmodern Era, then the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and the tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished.
I… What are you saying, Zsadist?" she stammered, even though she'd heard every word. He glanced back down at the pencil in his hand and then turned to the table. Flipping the spiral notebook to a new page, he bent way over and labored on top of the paper for quite a while. Then he ripped the sheet free. His hand was shaking as he held it out. "It's messy." Bella took the paper. In a child's uneven block letters there were three words: I LOVE YOU Her lips flattened tight as her eyes stung. The handwriting got wavy and then disappeared.  "Maybe you can't read it," he said in a small voice. "I can do it over."  She shook her head. "I can read it just fine. It's… beautiful." "I don't expect anything back. I mean… I know that you don't… feel that for me anymore. But I wanted you to know. It's important that you knew.
Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. It’s the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.
I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world.
What’s next? The size of my cock?†“Hey, even pencils can get the job done—I’ve heard the moaning from your room to prove it.
Love stories are written in millimeters and milliseconds with a fast, dull pencil whose marks you can barely see, they are written in miles and eons with a chisel on the side of a mountiantop
You know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know that if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning. Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it.
The pencil sharpener is about as far as I have ever got in operating a complicated piece of machinery with any success.
We pencil-sketch our previous life so we can contrast it to the technicolor of the moment.
Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It's made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!