Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party.

I've never thought it was necessary to make fun of people - you can find fun in people without necessarily mocking them.

The North isn't a place. It's just a direction out of the South.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

To me, letters have always been a robust medium of sublimation. I don't remember what I was like before I learned my ABC's, but for as long as I can remember I have made them with my fingers and felt them in my bones.

I like weeding, but I tend to think of it as a solitary activity.

Vincent van Gogh's mother painted all of his best things. The famous mailed decapitated ear was a figment of the public relations firm engaged by Van Gogh's dealer.