I've been within an inch of my life.

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 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.

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.

You are a cosmic flower. Om chanting is the process of opening the psychic petals of that flower.

I am guilty of using dollar signs as proof of a work of art's longevity.

There's never a right way to tell somebody that they've been traded.

In my opinion, the best setup guys now have a tougher job than the closers. They pitch more innings, inherit more runners.

Pundits are saying that President Obama is starting to lose support among his own party. To give you an idea of how bad it's gotten, today Jimmy Carter compared him to Jimmy Carter.

I'm always looking for people to feel connected to me and inspired in their own right.

Preaching, in the first sense of the word, ceased as soon as ever the gospel was written.

I'm not going to be a name chaser. I just love to fight.

Revenge isn't always as sweet as it seems