Dept. of Speculation is gorgeous, funny, a profound and profoundly moving work of art. Jenny Offill is a master of form and feeling, and she gets life on the page in new, startling ways.

When you work at home, fellow alums, discipline is the supreme virtue. Suicidal self-loathing lurks behind every coffee break. Activities must be expertly scheduled, from shopping to showers to panic attacks.

I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy.

Atticus Lish is a true original and this is a tremendous book, relentless, moving, written in prose of marvelous integrity. Now that America and the novel are dead, I hope we can have more great American novels as alive as this one.

Everything's weird if you stare at it.

One of my big revelations was that nobody cares whether you write your novel or not. They want you to be happy. Your parents want you to have health insurance. Your friends want you to be a good friend. But everyone’s thinking about their own problems and nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, ‘Boy, I sure hope Sam finishes that chapter and gets one step closer to his dream of being a working writer.’ Nobody does that. If you want to write, it has to come from you. If you don’t want to write, that’s great. Go do something else. That was a very liberating moment for me.

I had a teacher once who said, "If you are going to write fiction, you should only read poetry." I have always been interested in the writers who care about their sentences and who really work on that level. I have always said that I hate writing, I love revision. So, the language is really important to me. And the comedy and the horror that come out of the language.