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

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.

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 write to believe in goodness.

The greatest wealth is well-being.

She was fighting for something, she feltalive and capable of responding to the challenges facing her.

The depth of any story is proportionate to the protagonist's commitment to their goal, the complexity of the problem, and the grace of the solution.

The hardest thing is to give up something you love, for the sake of Allah. But remember Allah never takes without giving something better.

I get recognised in the street, but that's more from all the Scottish people who are down in Blackpool on their holidays.

Mighty to inspire new hopes, and able to drown the bitterness of cares.

Follow diligently the Way in your own heart, but make no display of it to the world.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

My business is not reading your messages. I don't have a business doing that. And it's against my values to do that. I don't want to read your private stuff.