"The Genre ('knock-knock,' 'a horse walks into a bar,' 'take my wife') sets us up for an expectation. When the payoff is inevitable, but surprising, 'orange you glad I didn't say banana,' 'Why the long face,' 'PLEASE'), we laugh."

"We don’t make decisions based on our experiences.  We make them based on the stories of our experiences.  And we don’t form our stories based on an accurate reflection of experience.  We form them like novelists, and we look for a good ending."

"Some might argue that novels shouldn't have to have a great ending, that we should just enjoy spending time with the characters.  Sorry ... We demand great endings of our movies and our plays, and we'll continue to do so of our novels."

"I often start something and have no idea how it'll end.  The sense of surprise there, to me, is like magic every time." 

"I don't like formulas.  I don't like novels where I know the ending halfway through."

"A teacher of mine used to say that a good short story led to a moment of surprise, which he defined as more truth than we think we have a right to expect."

"How I love the fun of a shocker, the I-had-no-idea-wouldn't-have-guessed-in-a-million-years surprise.  My jaded self reads the summary of a movie or book and thinks, 'Well, I know what that will be about.  No thank you.'"  How I love to be proven wrong."

"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."

"An ending says something about the story and the characters. It also says something about you the author."

"We must all remember that it's natural to be a little scared of our story.  To be unsure of the ending.  To be unsure of ourselves."

"You'll know if the ending works. You'll know because you're happy with it. It's that simple."

"Gogol once said that the true, unwritten last line of every story is: 'And nothing was ever the same again.'  The same could also be said for the first line of any story: 'And from that moment on, everything was about to change.'"

"I try to write the first draft very quickly.  I don't write the end.  I don't write the last quarter.  So I write my draft.  And then ... my next draft is usually cleaning it up and seeing what's there: 'What do we have here?'"

"Writing something means finishing something. End of story. I mean, literally. End of story."

"A story has many threads: character arcs, themes, ideas, plots, and so forth. A good ending ties up most of these. The best ending ties them all up."

"Every great story, regardless of genre, will include a twist.  Why?  Readers want to be both satisfied and surprised.  The more they can decipher exactly where a story is going, the more disappointed they'll be.... Satisfying twists are revelatory in the sense that they add new meaning to all that precedes them."

"An author should never be afraid to let an ending offer new questions heaped upon the answers of the old."