She said Robert Joyner had killed himself with a gun. And then I asked why, and then she told me that he was getting a divorce and was sad about it.' 'Lots of people get divorces and don't kill themselves,' I said. 'I know,' she said, excitement in her voice. 'That's what I told her.

I liked that he was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointments in the Department of Having a Voice that Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin.

And yes, again, that was it exactly. A retyper and not a writer. A prodigy and not a genius.

The snow may be falling in the winter of my discontent, but at least I've got sarcastic company.

Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I'm writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

He missed that, too, and it hadn't even happened.

The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you'll think "they'll remember me now," but (a) they don't remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion.