What's going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I'll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a film script out of it.

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.

I don't think you could teach someone to be a genius, but you can certainly teach them to not make rookie mistakes and to look at writing the way a writer looks at writing, and not just the way a reader looks at writing. There are a lot of techniques and skills that can be taught that will be helpful to anybody, no matter how gifted they are, and I think writing programs can be very good for people.

There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.

I thought, I fanced, that in a moment, I would be standing on nothing at all, and for the first time in my life, I needed the wings none of us has.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

Every Messiah fails, the moment he tries to redeem himself.