Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

Although the only way that I'm well known at Illinois State is that I am the "grammar Nazi." And so any student whose deployment of a semi-colon is not absolutely Mozart-esque knows that they're going to get a C in my class, and so my classes tend to have like four students in them. It's really a lot of fun.

Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.

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

In the broadest possible sense, writing well means to communicate clearly and interestingly and in a way that feels alive to the reader. Where there’s some kind of relationship between the writer and the reader - even though it’s mediated by a kind of text - there’s an electricity about it.

The lives of most people are small tight pallid and sad, more to be mourned than their deaths. We starve at the banquet: We cannot see that there is a banquet because seeing the banquet requires that we see also ourselves sitting there starving-seeing ourselves clearly, even for a moment, is shattering. We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most "familiarity" is meditated and delusive.