I'm going to proportion more time to organizing and taking action and less time to passively consuming news that is dispiriting me. Part of this will be to get off social media. I know social media is just a tool, but we've been using it in a way that has transformed us from a nation into an audience, passively spectating our own ruin.

I have a hard time defending the production of candy, given that it is basically crack for children and makes them dependent in unwholesome ways.

I love men, the restlessness of their corrupted souls, the way they hide their heavy, murderous hearts, their sudden delicacies and small shocking acts of tenderness.

There's an invisible army of woman and men who really don't get why we give so much of ourselves to football. And they need to SPEAK UP.

You've got all these parents who are projecting their pathologies of fear onto their kids and those kids are understandably messed up. Tragedies happen and that you have to allow kids to experience their own fear and guilt and sorrow. It's the cover-up that really screws people over. Unfortunately, America specializes in cover-ups.

I've felt pressure to produce long fiction for as long as I've been writing fiction. There's just an incredible bias in the publishing industry toward novels and away from short stories. They're seen as D.O.A. in the marketplace, which seems nuts to me, given that various collections done smashingly and deservedly well in economic terms.

We need books...because we are all, in the private kingdoms of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend.