A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.

Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?

It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.

... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.

Was anything in the world truer than that intuitive leap of the heart?

Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.