I turned forty, and I'm finally going to get married and maybe have a kid.

Literature precedes genre.

You could pay Arthur Janov to teach you to scream about history, or you could learn prayer or a mantra, or you could write your life down and hope to make peace with it, write it down, or paint it, or turn it into improvisational theater, but that was the best you could probably do. You were stuck.

Deviants and losers and mutants and the loveless... were the proper readers of Marvel comics.

I have admired Melissa Pritchard’s writing for several years now for its wisdom, its humble elegance, and its earthy comedy.

I do think that just about whenever I am writing, or more accurately, whenever I have written, I feel better and more at peace as a human being. That doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that the literary product is any good.

He seemed as though he were habitually preparing himself for something awful, and this was justified because many awful things had happened to him.

I sort of hate the novel when it doesn’t push, restlessly, against the tradition and the traditional.

Cool is spent. Cool is empty. Cool is ex post facto. When advertisers and pundits hoard a word, you know it’s time to retire from it. To move on. I want to suggest, therefore, that we begin to avoid cool now. Cool is a trick to get you to buy garments made by sweatshop laborers in Third World countries. Cool is the Triumph of the Will. Cool enables you to step over bodies. Cool enables you to look the other way. Cool makes you functional, eager for routine distraction, passive, doped, stupid.

The sounds of southwestern cacti are broadcast for several weeks until, by general assent, it is agreed that cacti make no sounds.