Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves.

I'm grateful when stories come in a rush, although I keep an eye on them afterwards, to see whether they hold together. It's harder to judge the ones that took so long to finish. With those, I've lost perspective. Mostly I'm just glad that I can be done with them.

Life is a series of sudden disappearances, leave-takings without the proper goodbyes.

Becka might have been average in L.A., but average in L.A. is Queen of Mars in the visiting room of a federal penitentiary in North Carolina.

I think that we want to be led slightly astray when we're being told a story. Just a little wrong footed.

Sometimes it is safer to read maps with your feet.

You say that if we hadn't just gotten married, you would want to marry Miss Arkansas. Even if she can't spell. She can sit on her hair. A lover could climb that hair like a gym rope. It's fairy-tale hair, Rapunzel hair. We saw her practicing for the pageant in the hotel ballroom with two wild pigs, her hair braided into two lassoes.