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

You have to beat your own problematic imagination to discover what it is you're saying and how to say it and move forward into the unknown.

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.

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.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

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

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