I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden.

've always defined a truly alluring story as a journey we're not equipped to take ourselves with a person we're tempted but afraid to emulate. Impostor narratives are exactly that. When they end in disaster, as Clark's did, or as Gatsby's did, we can congratulate ourselves for our own wisdom. We can also experience, safely, at no cost, the terrible thrill of radical self-invention, of trading who we are for who we might be.

Spirit was a by-product of activity, like the reflection from a spinning fan blade, and our souls in the end did not reside within us but flowed outward from our movements.

The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialise alone.

The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.

There are moments when it frightens us, threatening to expose us as inauthentic. Well, the big-time impostors we read about in literature run this risk constantly, flirting with destruction, not just humiliation or embarrassment. It's a spectacle that we can't help but find compelling, and it involves a certain level of courage that we sneakily admire, perhaps.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.