In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at...

A novel is just a story that hasn’t yet discovered a way to be brief.

Dad had once said, Trust your mind, Rob. If it smells like shit but has writing across it that says Happy Birthday and a candle stuck down in it, what is it?Is there icing on...

Though firm, we are never too firm, though we love fun, we never have fun in a silly way that makes us appear ridiculous, unless that is our intent.

I loved Monty Python for the wordplay–this sense that you didn’t have to squash your intelligence to be funny. In fact, you could walk right into your intelligence and nerdiness and self-doubt, and that could...

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I’m not being clear, exactly, but don’t you kind of feel what I’m feeling?

What America is, to me, is a guy doesn’t want to buy, you let him not buy, you respect his not buying. A guy has a crazy notion different from your crazy notion, you pat...

One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds....

A story is a really weird art object that should contain life but not be enslaved by the banality.

Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.

What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It’s good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It’s good for us when, in spite of all of the...

America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice.

Sweet Evelyn, I think, I should have loved you better.Possessing perfect knowledge I hover above him as he hacks me to bits. I see his rough childhood. I see his mother doing something horrid to...

higher” you – brighter, less willing to coast or condescend, funnier, and (mysteriously) also, I think, kinder.

Be bigger presence at work. Race up ladder (joyfully, w/smile on face), get raise. Get in best shape of life, start dressing nicer. Learn guitar? Make point of noticing beauty of world? Why not educate...

No, war will not be stopped. But it is a comfort, in the midst of a war, to read an antiwar book this good, and be reminded that just because something keeps happening, doesn’t mean...

In a culture that is becoming ever more story-stupid, in which a representative of the Coca-Cola company can, with a straight face, pronounce, as he donates a collection of archival Coca-Cola commercials to the Library...

It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.

The writer,’ said Donald Barthelme, ‘is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.’ In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in...

You were torturing a cat,” she says. “With a freaking prod.””A prod I built myself in metal shop,” he says. “But of course you never mention that.

Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day’s end. They were manifesting as the earth’s bright-colored nerve endings, the sun’s descent urging them...

Is this the baby?” I said.Ma turned on me again.”What do you think it is?” she said. “A midget that can’t talk?

Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal.

He sent the trained dog that is his talent off in search of a fat glorious pheasant, and it brought back the lower half of a Barbie doll.

We pretend to catch and eat more pretend bugs than could ever actually live in one cave. The number of pretend bugs we pretend to catch and eat would in reality basically fill a cave...

I took me to the Banks of the River, and tarried there awhile, as the lowering Sun made one with the Water, giving generously of Itself & its Diverse Colors, in a Splay of Magnificence...

Every step was a victory. He had to remember that.

If at the moment when someone cuts us off in traffic or breaks our heart or begins bombing our ancestral village, we could withdraw from judging mode, and enter this other, more accepting mode, we...

And next time we hear someone saying something like, ‘We are pursuing this strategy because other strategies, when we had considered them, we concluded that, in terms of overall effectiveness, they were not sound strategies,...

O.K., then, all right, they would adopt a white-trash dog. Ha ha. They could name it Zeke, buy it a little corncob pipe and a straw hat. She imagined the puppy, having crapped on the...

I guess you just have to trust your kids, trust that their innate interest in life will win out in the end, don’t you think?

After that came her biggie: a triple murder–her dealer, the dealer’s sister, and the dealer’s sister’s boyfriend.Reading that made me feel a little funny that we’d fucked and I’d loved her.

[P]eople think of compassion as, like, kindness. The image comes to mind of some nice New Age guy bending to something with a look on his face like he’s about to cry. And I don’t...

I hold the biscuits in front of his face and he stands up.”What do I have to do?” he says.”Nothing,” I say. “They’re for you.””Are they poisoned?” he says.”No,” I say.”Eat one,” he says.So I...

A bad thing happened to you kids, Dad said. But it could have been worse.So much worse, Mom said.But because of you kids, Dad said, it wasn’t.You did so good, Mom said.Did beautiful, Dad said.

I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a...

Those stories tended to be located around the places where things went wrong, and people were cruel to one another, and so on. They reflected what was probably the most urgent truth operating in me...

Mr. A calls me into his office and says he’s got bad news and bad news, and which do I want first. I say the bad news.

One of pleasures of parenting, future reader: parent can positively influence kid, make moment kid will remember for rest of life, moment that alters his/her trajectory, opens up his/her heart + mind.

The thing about girls? Suzanne said. Is we are more content-driven.

A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possibl, and as cautiously, because it knows its girth and the tight...

Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.

Rachel got up and did this happy little shuffle, like she was some cheerful farmer chick who’d just stepped outside to find the hick she was in love with coming up the road with a...

Fiction is an urgent business. It is the Dying Us telling stories to the Dying Us, trying to crack the nonsense in our heads open with a big hammer pronto, before Death arrives.

What I’m primarily saying,’ he says, ‘is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropriate response....

I wander cowboy sidewalks of wood, wearing a too-small hat, filled with remorse for the many lives I failed to lead.

Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end,...

Do not really like rich people, as they make us poor people feel dopey and inadequate. Not that we are poor. I would say we are middle. We are very, very lucky. I know that....

. . . Absurdism was really just realism seen from close to the bottom.

From across the woods, as if by common accord, birds left their trees and darted upward. I joined them, flew amount them, they did not recognize me as something apart from them, and I was...