Everybody should customize their names.

When blame has been assigned, the story is over.

Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly... The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.

Literature is not a sack race. There aren't real winners and losers in the Republic of Letters.

There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

The worst mistakes I've made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness.