(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.

Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!

I don't think of any sentence as a "one-liner", but I do pay attention to how people actually speak when they are being funny. Rhythm is key.

If I retain any freshness of approach, it's by going slowly having long intervals between finished projects.

But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.