You can always spot a 'television personality', even when they aren't actually on television, because they carry their 'made-up' persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

I enjoy doing very high mileages, partly out of masochism and also because I like to feel the shape of the landscape.

There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It's because America has such an ideology of success.

Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered another peculiar chimera: septuagenarians with apoptosis sporting the depeche mode.