I want my prose to be as clear as a pane of glass.

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

Curing yourself of obsessive compulsive disorder by going to a strip club is pretty strange.

Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.