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

I know I never work in whatever gets called an office, e.g., a school office I use only for meeting students and storing books I know I'm not going to read anytime soon.

Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie, receding forever.

Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?

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

I like the fans’ sound at night. Do you? It’s like somebody big far away goes like: it’sOKit’sOKit’sOKit’sOK, over and over. From very far away.

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