Most of the dialogue in my novel Mist and Shadow is something that I made up (as writerly peeps tend to do.)

But there are a few lines in there that were spoken by other people in Real Life and written down by me for posterity.

I enjoy using real comments here and there because it preserves what was otherwise a fleeting, unimportant comment lost to time and memory. And they are comments that I wouldn’t have thought of on my own, which makes them opportunities to create an authentic moment in the ...