You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

The harder you had to work to open a package, the less you ended up caring about what was inside.

If you were seeing a lot of horseshit, there had to be a pony in the vicinity.

These self-appointed deacons in the Church of Latter-Day American Literature seem to regard generosity (of words) with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result is a strange and arid literary climate where a meaningless little fingernail paring like Nicholson Baker's Vox becomes an object of fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious American novel like Matthew's Heart of the Country is all but ignored.

The one thing about kids is that you never really know exactly what they're thinking or how they're seeing. After writing about kids, which is a little bit like putting the experience under a magnifying glass, you realize you have no idea how you thought as a kid. I've come to the conclusion that most of the things that we remember about our childhood are lies. We all have memories that stand out from when we were kids, but they're really just snapshots. You can't remember how you reacted because your whole head is different when you stand aside.

No one likes to see a government folder with his name on it.

Let's face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.