Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head.

Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.

And when he came to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.

No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.