All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.
At the end of night, before you close your eyes, be content with what you’ve done and be proud of who you are.
A good teacher, after all, wields the authority of a parent with none of the psychological baggage. The best of them are semi-mysterious figures whose wisdom seems boundless and whose approval helps us discover who we are.
We are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn’t embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and all that we have to offer, in the end, is love.
Nothing on Earth is so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night.
Why are people so fascinated by how to eat Valomilks?’ She said, ‘Well, Dad, they’re round and they’re messy. But that’s what makes them fun. Once we get older we’re not supposed to be messy anymore. But for one moment when you’re eating a Valomilk, it’s okay to be messy again.
I have a hard time defending the production of candy, given that it is basically crack for children and makes them dependent in unwholesome ways.
Misery loves another idiot with a jukebox where his soul should be.
At about the age of ten, during a late summer visit to Sears to buy school clothes, I became aware of the concept of candy by the pound.
To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.
There’s something incredibly liberating about a holiday that encourages children to take candy from strangers.
It is in these moments of tender and ridiculous nostalgia that I know something inside me is still broken.
I love men, the restlessness of their corrupted souls, the way they hide their heavy, murderous hearts, their sudden delicacies and small shocking acts of tenderness.
Most forms of rage, after all, are only sloppy cloaks for grief.
The single biggest reason I got my stories taken in various literary magazines – and I want to stress this – is because I refused to give up. Period.
All language is an aspiration to music.
The answer is that we don’t choose our freaks, they choose us.
Art arises from loss. I wish this weren’t the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don’t work out, when you’re licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.
One of the reasons I hate Hollywood so much is that they portray the travails of teen life as so innocuous and fun loving, some kind of idyll before the mean business of adulthood. People forget how much it all hurts back then. Someone pinches you and you feel it in your bones. They don’t want to face what a bunch of fragile sadists teenagers were. All these folks who acted all shocked and outraged when those kids in Columbine went off – where the hell did they go to high school?
There is a point you reach, I mean, when you are just something bad that happened to someone else.