Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your brain, draining all the juice out of you.

It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.

I'm not making an enemy; I'm keepin' one.

Fear is the emotion that makes us blind.

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

I write about things that scare me. I've never written a snake story in my life. I myself have never written a story about snakes because they don't scare me. I write about rats because they scare the hell out of me.

But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.