…imagination without energy remains inert...
It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it.
Grace believed that those who could see their duty clearly were required by God to do the heavy lifting for the morally blind. Where
You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens...
…a story is like a virus that can rage only for as long as there are new hosts to infect.
People cling to folly as if it were their most prized possession, defending it, sometimes with violence, against the possibility of wisdom. It
The task he has chosen for himself, of wooing my mother with a bright red pickup truck, a Patsy Cline tape, and a string of malapropisms, is ample justification to me for not taking the world too seri...
Truth be told, I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.
My dad had this rock hard body and would work 12- to 13-hour days. The guys he worked with were scrap-iron guys. Nobody on that road crew had read a book in 10 years, but there was something about the...
Stories worked much the same way…A false note at the beginning was much more costly than one nearer the end because early errors were part of the foundation.
One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them.
If you paid me for work, continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, I wouldn't have to feel worthless. There's not law says old peopl...
An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered, was her conclusion. A condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right and wrong almost incidental.
At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious.
They're around back, she calls down when Julie and I get out. Planning their strategy. Good for them, I say, confident that no strategy that isn't grounded in chaos theory is likely to work against a...
Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.
Like many men addicted to sports, Clive Sr. was also a religious man and one who’d been raised to accept life’s mysteries—the Blessed Trinity, for one instance, a woman’s reasoning, for another.
Just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. Slow works in an altogether differ...
I never worry about people not taking my work seriously as a result of the humor. In the end, the comic's best trick is the illusion that comedy is effortless. That people imagine what he's doing is e...
About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldn't find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug sto...