Don't get me wrong, I love literary fiction. It's faux literary fiction I can't stand.

Choice, I've always believed, is all that separates us from animals.

My daughter squealed again and both Bubba and I winced. It’s not an attractive sound, that. It’s high-pitched and it enters your ear canals like hot glass. No matter how much I love my daughter, I will never love her squealing. Or maybe I will. Maybe I do. Driving down 93, I realized once and for all, that I love the things that chafe. The things that fill me with stress so total I can’t remember when a block of it didn’t rest on top of my heart. I love what, if broken, can’t be repaired. What, if lost can’t be replaced. I love my burdens.

There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.

I held her, he wanted to say, and if I knew for certain that all it would take to hold her again would be to die, then I couldn't raise the gun to my head fast enough.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

The loneliness of another can be shocking when it lays itself bare without warning.