I'm very happy - if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I'm thrilled.

The one thing about A Christmas Carol that always bothers me is that Cratchit is so sweet and perfect. He's like an Ivy League kid who just is labeled "poor." He doesn't have any bad habits. He's never cranky with his kids.

Stay alert. The big moral crossroads in your life may not come labeled as such.

It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.

If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.

To understand any plea for further consideration of a group you don't know anything about to be some form of, quote, political correctness. These things are bubbling right under us.

Realism is to fiction what gravity is to walking: a confinement that allows dancing under the right circumstances.