I generally wade in blind and trust to fate and instinct to see me through.

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.

What was the worst thing you've ever done? I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing.

You cannot overestimate the role of intuition in fiction writing. Or the role of accident or randomness. These things are very central. This is never really admitted. You have to cover the pages. You have to have those people do things. And the things they do have to be relevant to the entire concern. The specific things they do don't much matter, you just have to have them do something that counts.

I liked the place I came from. But a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.

Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.

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