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 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.
All language is an aspiration to music.
The answer is that we don’t choose our freaks, they choose us.