Nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side.

Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.

With American Morons, Glen Hirshberg confidently shoulders his way through the generational pack to claim his rightful place on the summit. These stories are smart, challenging, ripe with feeling, expansive in every way: Horror as it should be writ, and as only the best and most expressive can write it.

God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.

Occasionally.. .what you have to do is go back to the beginning and see everything in a new way.

There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.