Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.

There's only a short walk from the hallelujah to the hoot.

Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.

Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.

We are only possible as what happened to us yesterday. We all change as well move

Roscoe was spiritually illegal, a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory.

Anger makes people stupid.