The most difficult thing about writing; is writing the first line.

On the morning after the daring theft of a priceless James Ensor painting from the Grand Palais in Paris, I was allowed to leave the Les Halles Police Station after only a few hours of...

In darkness there is death.

I never sleep. Like the dolphin and the spiny anteater, I don’t experience REM. Unlike the dreamless mammals, I’m a construct. I am a living program inside a vast network of electronic impulses known as...

His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station at the outskirts of Madison, Kentucky.

I never really wanted to die. But I followed through anyway. The pain in my heart was excruciating, and death was beautiful.

I don’t like killing, but I’m good at it. Murder isn’t so bad from a distance, just shapes popping up in my scope. Close-up work though – a garrotte around a target’s neck or a...

I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see...

Where shall we three meet again in thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurlyburly ‘s done, when the battle ‘s lost and won

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each...

Your mother hollers that you’re going to miss the bus. She can see it coming down the street. You don’t stop and hug her and tell her you love her. You don’t thank her for...

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice…

I come Des Moines. Somebody had to.

Hi. I’m here to enlist.You can’t. You aren’t human.You see, little fella, we don’t do sociological stuff like “interspeciated workplaces.” We’re a crack company of space mercenaries. We do “hurting people” and “breaking things.”Sounds like...

My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Who is John Galt?

This is the story of a man named Eddie and it starts at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It may seem strange to start a story with and ending, but all endings...