In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.
A fantastically huge, roiling cloud, glowing bluish gray, swaggered over the city. It was more than three miles tall. Below it Hiroshima was boiling.
Sure, I knew the differences between a space opera and a hard-boiled detective story and a historical novel...but I never about such differences. It seemed to me, then as now, that there are good stories and bad stories, and that was the only distinc...
When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's 'The Thieving Magpie,' which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
Pressure cookers are relatively inexpensive, they're in every kitchen store, your grandma probably had one, but a lot of people don't. A pressure cooker is interesting because by pressurizing the vessel, you're able to cook much hotter than the boili...
I live in New Orleans, because it's the strangest city in the United States. It has the highest murder rate in the country, the highest incarceration rate, and often we have to boil our drinking water, but there's nowhere else remotely like it.
I think perhaps Pakistan can take the lead. Perhaps Turkey can as well, being part of Europe. But someone has to start talking about why the Muslim world has become a boiling pot and look beyond these cartoons to what the ideological reasons are for ...
Great big bugger,' said Aziraphale. 'Sleepeth beneath the thunders of the upper deep. Under loads of huge and unnumbered polypol - polipo - bloody great seaweeds, you know. Supposed to rise to the surface right at the end, when the sea boils.
As fire when thrown into water is cooled down and put out, so also a false accusation when brought against a man of the purest and holiest character, boils over and is at once dissipated, and vanishes and threats of heaven and sea, himself standing u...
The grief of losing my father has come in waves over the years, as it does with most people. His love and devotion as a father provided my closest, most intimate relationship. Dad, and our time together, is in my bones. While reflecting on him, the m...
Life is fragile: it thrives only in a narrow range of temperatures between freezing and boiling. How lucky that our planet is just the right distance from the sun: a little farther, and the death of the perpetual Antarctic winter - or worse - would p...
If 'Star Wars' wasn't enough to prepare me for a dark future, there was the 'Planet of the Apes' franchise, conveniently repeated for me in Los Angeles on KABC's Channel Seven 3:30 movie. Apes enslaving humans! Mutants with boils and an atom bomb! Ap...
Life has evolved to thrive in environments that are extreme only by our limited human standards: in the boiling battery acid of Yellowstone hot springs, in the cracks of permanent ice sheets, in the cooling waters of nuclear reactors, miles beneath t...
I've been collecting articles on extremophile bacteria for at least the last ten years. I find them fascinating, whether they live in boiling pools at Yellowstone, around thermal vents at the floors of the oceans, or on Mars, where NASA has been sear...
Never give up your day job. I do all sorts of things, but at the end of the day, it all boils down to 'The Today Show,' and I love doing this thing, and they will have to blow me out of here with dynamite before I leave.
Some writers like to boil down headlines of liberal newspapers into fiction, so they say there shouldn't be communal riots, everybody should love each other, there shouldn't be boundaries or fundamentalism. But I think literature is more than that; t...
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that...
Things are still in early stages, but one can imagine that as we build up and systematize our theories of these associations, and try to boil them down to their core, the result might point us toward the sort of fundamental principles I advocate.
I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of ...
I have kind of a weird technique with zucchini. I cut it into small cubes; sweat it in olive oil, adding just a little oil at time so it crisps. Then I cover it with boiling water, not stock, which really brings out the flavor of the zucchini, add le...
Tequila: Do you have any dreams? Alan: I do. I want to move to Antartica. Tequila: It's freezing there. You like that? Alan: At least I can come out of the dark. There's daylight 24 hours a day there.
