The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.

Rant said that view of time was set up so folks won't live forever. It's the planned obsolescence we've all agreed to...'Nothing says you have to swallow this,' Rant told me. 'You can always just die.

Writing is like sex, if it's difficult you're not doing it right.

How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: The Renaissance pencilled in for right after the Dark Ages. The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Post-Modern Era, then The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished.

Maybe it's our sins that give God consolation when he finally has to give us cancer.

Just keep asking yourself: What would Jesus not do?

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.