I feel like there are too many words in the world, and I think silence is so much more powerful than the glut of words.

People have to follow their own strangeness. The minute they start making their own vision of the world flattened out so everyone can read it, they lose. I encourage people to be as awkward and odd on the page to capture their own way of seeing the world and not trying to see the world for other people.

As a professor I can't teach writing.

Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean looking straight at us--warts, lots of warts, and beauty and hypocrisy and love, too, the gamut. And hes done it again in this brilliant The Happiest People in the World, a novel that is as hilarious and thought-provoking as it is ultimately, deadly, deadly serious. I for one am grateful hes out there--watching our every move.

I revise and revise and revise. I'm not even sure "revise" is the right word. I work a story almost to death before it's done.

I feel like there are too many words in the world, and I think silence is so much more powerful than the glut of words.

I think that maybe happy families don't need stories the way unhappy families need stories. Maybe they're too busy living that they don't actually step back and talk about life like the Anton Chekhov quote. I prefer Anton Chekhov to Lev Tolstoy, and the reason is because of what he leaves out. Sometimes I think Tolstoy had a theory that he was proving and he proved it. Chekhov is more ambiguous.