This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.

This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.

Life's so much easier when you're not always maintaining two worlds: the one formed of lies, which feels real, and the one you live in, which often feels like lies. So easy to get them confused.

The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.

Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some.

What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it's a good story.

Football's another sport I absolutely despise. Along with baseball. Really, for me, basketball's the only real sport, the only one that matters.

Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.

I do love the challenge of screenplays. They're so difficult, such an alien form. It makes them endlessly fascinating. Something I can't keep my fingers out of.

Could feel the reservation wheeling around him, changing shape so that he nearly had to vomit, or hold his arms to his head and scream against it all.

Time is God’s given asset to humans

Its magnificence was indescribable, and its magnitude was inconceivable. She felt overwhelmed in the presence of its greatness. Pg 87

The problems afflicting a nation are always in equal measure spiritual crises.

He nothing common did, or mean, / Upon that memorable scene, / But with his keener eye / The axe's edge did try.

I read a great deal, avoided the comapny of the children in school who seemed superfical, and fell in love with nature.

The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men.

No taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant.

It gives me no joy to be praised at the expense of a better artist, by someone who does not know the difference or who thinks me too vain to be aware of it myself.

I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.

Make your life a happy one. That is where success is possible to every man.