Life is an honor, albeit anonymously delivered.

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become legends.

I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

Wherever we go we do harm, forgiving ourselves as wheels do cement for wearing each other out. We set this house on fire, forgetting that we live within. (from "To a Meadowlark," for M.L. Smoker)

We Americans are trained to think big, talk big, act big, love big, admire bigness but then the essential mystery is in the small.

I'd rather get a brain tumor than go back to teaching.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.