My teaching career started with me teaching comp at a very small school in Buffalo. And I was terrible at that point. They never should have hired me.

The least trusted testimony in a court of law is eyewitness testimony. We are simply not good reporters of facts that happen to us, or in front of us. But that's not the same as knowingly lying.

I think the act of lying can be separated from the genre of memoir. Though often times, people are unaware of their own subjectivity.

The biggest thing was that second person allowed me to trick myself into revealing more about myself. It gave me an authorial distance to get closer to the action and emotions, if that makes sense.

I like the fact that second person puts the reader in the story. It makes them, whether they like it or not, complicit in the action.

I think every narrator is an unreliable narrator. In its classic definition - an unreliable narrator is one who reveals something they don't know themselves to be revealing. We all do that.

I like a text that reminds the reader its a text sometimes.

I'd say the music influences the writing - the music and rhythm of the prose - much more than the writing influences the music.

You can't hide behind the guise of fiction. No matter how autobiographical a fictional scene is, you can always tell the reader - in protecting yourself - that you made it up.

I don't teach narrative theory by itself anymore, but I kind of use it when critiquing student manuscripts. So, it works its way in there, whether I like it or not.

I have an MFA in writing. It is debatable if they are right for everyone, but I had a mentor who really changed my life, so it worked for me.

If I go on a diet and work out, I'm always in a bad mood. I'd rather be a little heavier but nice.

In the corporate world you get a report card every quarter and have to talk about it, whereas the church can drip, drip through bad trends for decades and decades.

When a man asks your advice, he usually tells you just how he expects you to decide.

All honor to the noble women that have devoted earnest lives to the intellectual needs of mankind!

I am convinced that through these measures we have reestablished confidence.

Men ought to be most annoyed by the sufferings which come from their own faults.

A story, after all, does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening.

Cooperate with your destiny, don't go against it, don't thwart it. Allow it to fulfill itself.

And funerals are pretty compared to deaths.

We are going to stand together, united.