Capitalism doesn't consider morality. It considers profitability.

Football offers us a sanitized spectacle of combat that has a clear resolution, which we need more and more today given our incoherent overseas "wars."

But something occurred to me as I sped through that dirty shroud of fog, something Vonnegut has been trying to explain to the rest of us for most of his life. And that is this: Despair is a form of hope. It is an acknowledgment of the distance between ourselves and our appointed happiness. At certain moments, it is reason enough to live.

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

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.

The single biggest reason I got my stories taken in various literary magazines - and I want to stress this - is because I refused to give up. Period.

All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.