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

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.

I was a great many far cries from myself.

I've been within an inch of my life.

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.

I'd say I never considered myself a great architect. I'm more of a creative problem solver with good taste and a soft spot for logistical nightmares.

The people inside the gym didn’t stand a dead drunk’s chance.

We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.

Anorexia taught me to love life and to realise that starving yourself to death is a bloody waste of time. It's awful and it hurts so many people around you. It's a terribly selfish thing to do.

A dream is only a dream.. until you decide to make it real

Don't put a lump of rock under my elbow again!

I completely appreciate the importance of fathers but millions of children are without loving homes. I think a child is lucky with one parent who truly loves her.

Garbage clutters the house that has no dream.

Survey 2001: Men who never married, never had a child, worked full time and were college educated earn only 85% of what women with the same criteria earn.