College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.

To be inclusive you must accommodate different levels of sophistication.

Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that's an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.

He knew a lot about his grandparents - and perhaps he feels he's been endowed with abilities to go into people's heads who are long dead - but, to a certain extent, he's making it up.

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.