My personal belief is that because technology and economic logic has gotten so sophisticated, cruelties can be perpetrated now that would have been unimaginable two or three hundred years ago.

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.

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

I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.

Almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.