This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.

I already killed you once today, what does it take to teach some people?

Biting's excellent. It's like kissing - only there is a winner.

My ideal reader is me. And yes, my ideal reader comes with me and is forgiving.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.