I'm not an academic; I'm just a bookish Joe who gets passionate about certain writers and suddenly wants to read everything they've ever written and find out why they wrote it.

I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and thats very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.

I went down like a tray of dishes

Make sure a conflict exists before working to resolve it.

There is nothing that makes me happier than sitting around the dinner table and talking until the candles are burned down.

Even when I'm sick and depressed, I love life.

The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.

We get these questions a lot from the enterprising young. It's a very intelligent question: You look at some old guy who's rich and you ask, 'How can I become like you, except faster?'

We must leave these beginnings, beings, believings- man, what are you growing?

I think Gov. Romney and Congressman Ryan are living in a fairly tale land on their energy policy.

Original work has no floor and no ceiling. You can reach essentially zero readers or millions.

I started in college as a business major and finally transferred to home economics and studied making clothes.

To become an academic expert takes years of studying. Academic experts are experts in how and what others have done. They use case studies and observation to understand a subject.