I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.

The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I'd once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy.

The bullshit never ends. That’s the main thing to remember. It never ends.

No emotion or insight is too small to inflict on the world. Let it all fly. Don't let it eat you from the inside.

There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten’s prose. Waste is an exhilarating and unnerving piece of fiction.

Of All the Gin Joints is one part cinematic history, one part old Hollywood weirdness, and one part handy basic bar guide, with a dash of romance and more than a few wry twists. Bailey and Hemingway prove themselves very entertaining cultural mixologists.

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.