Sleep is over-rated. Have you ever noticed how it's always recommended to people anybody with half a brain can see need to wake up?

After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.

To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.

Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don't drink so much. There aren't going to be enough liver transplants to go around.

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

A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.

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