“Be like a detective. See what’s going on around you.”

“What’s going on” she asked.“You been in on it the whole time, Roc, you know what’s going on,” he answered.”

“For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.”

“No private detective looks like a private detective. That's one of the first rules of private detection.""But if no private detective looks like a private detective, how does a private detective know what it is he's supposed not to look like? Seems to me there's a problem there.”

“Writers, even unpublished writers, have a tendency not to notice what’s going on around them when they are the center of attention.”

“You need to see things, REALLY see them, feel them, live them, so you know what’s big and what’s little, what matters and what to put aside.”