There's a gift in your lap and it's beautifully wrapped and it's not your birthday. You feel wonderful, you feel like somebody knows you're alive, you feel fear because it could be a bomb, because you think you're that important.

Large meadows are lovely for picnics and romping, but they are for the lighter feelings. Meadows do not make me want to write.

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.

But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.

Glen Hirshberg's stories are haunting, absolutely, but not only because of the content -- the stories themselves haunt, they stick around, they linger, inhabiting a little corner of the reader's brain and resurfacing to evoke mystery or sadness or longing. It's a pleasure to dive into Hirshberg's storytelling skills in American Morons.

To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.