I prefer the sorts of words that go their own way and are very choosy about where they end up. They don't fall for the first frillily syllabled thing to come along.

You get tired of always wondering anew why life has to take the place of youth.

Mike Topp is a disablingly funny writer--a miniaturist of nervous precisions, our supreme abridger of metropolitan startlement and inner fidgetry. He dazes and graces us.

What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life.

The writer, as I see it, has the right of way, so it's up to the reader to look out.

My writing isn’t a career or a craft or a hobby or anything like that. It is more like a tiny annex to my life, a little crawl space in which I occasionally end up by accident in the dark.

If I have a problem, it is this: there is a store where everything costs a dollar.

I was a great many far cries from myself.

I've been within an inch of my life.

Desks are terrible places, no matter how many wheels a chair might have. You can't do much about how drawers fill up.

Dylan Nice's Other Kinds is the most extraordinary short-story-col lection debut I have read in years. It is a book to be memorized.

If you want to know how to swim, you take lessons. If you want to walk on water, lessons won´t help you, just faith.

Thoughts are as simple as the process…a message from the soul

To sin by silence, when we should protest, Makes cowards out of men.

Still, it will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system.

I actually don't want a throne at all, because I don't view myself as a queen; I view myself as one of my fans.

In daily life language is important, if not in itself, then as a symptom.

You must not fall. / When you lose your balance, resist for a long time before turning yourself toward the earth. Then jump. / You must not force yourself to stay steady. You must move forward.

Suddenly a pair of searchlights lanced out from the frigate. They swept across the dark expanse - bright knives slicing the night into pieces.

I've always wanted to put a little solarium on the back of my house. You know. Glass.