Before I got my present job, I spent many years teaching writing part-time, so-called, at community colleges and universities. It's academia's version of migrant labor.

You're unusual. That's better than popular if you have some courage.

Peculiar as I was, and remain, I was trained to be practical. I'm still amazed at the radical temerity of my friends, you included, Julie, who choose poetry as their vocation. I envy your faith.

I loved short stories, and they were all I wanted to write. I love the compression of them and the exactitude needed to get a whole world into such a small space.

Whatever one may say about the perils of workshops, they help writers internalize an awareness of audience.

I figured that to be a writer I would need to have been born in the nineteenth century, be British, or have three names. So I turned my sights elsewhere . . . to acting.

Unless you're Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates, no one's going to recognize you on the street, and you're promoting your book, not yourself.

Whatever we know as children, this is the world, eaten whole and without question.

On a morning like this, fear is a blue sky emptied of birds.

A mask you ask? Optional I find!Masks lend appeal of a mysterious kind.

I felt I had to win. It seemed very important. I didn't know why it was important and I kept thinking, why do I think this is so important? And another part of me answered, just because it is.

The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs.

Consider that the devil doesn't sleep, but seeks our ruin in a thousand ways.

How can your God become our God and renew our prosperity and awaken in us dreams of returning greatness?

The blood will follow where the knife is driven, The flesh will quiver where the pincers tear.

I think there will always be a double standard between males and females, so I think that an actress is more likely to protect her public persona, so to speak, than an actor would be.

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.

In many lines of wok, it isn't how much you do that counts, but how much you do well and how often you decide right.