You are skilled. I exhort you.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.

I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.

Getting your foot in the door with some publishing people can be important when you're starting out as a writer, but it's also not enough to get you where you need to be.

It was strange the way he loved her; a side long and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention.

It's very hard right now to be a pro sports fan. The economics of this stuff is abysmal.