Kansas afternoons in late summer are peculiar and wondrous things. Often they are pregnant, if not over-ripe, with a pensive and latent energy that is utterly incapable of ever finding an adequate release for itself....

I choose to believe God had a more direct involvement in the creation of my heart and consciousness than in the creation of any book, no matter how thick or old it may be.

Living is the opposite of poetry. Poetry is the recollection of living, or, more often than not, the lament of having not lived. Or worse yet, merely the contemplation of living. My advice to you,...

Heresy kicks ass.

Analysis is the art of creation through destruction.

Good fiction doesn’t claim to mirror reality at all. It indicts reality by providing a paradigm of shape and order and justice—the way we all know things should be—without suggesting that’s how things really are....

The stage is a magic circle where only the most real things happen, a neutral territory outside the jurisdiction of Fate where stars may be crossed with impunity. A truer and more real place does...

You can never really escape. It goes with you, wherever you go. Somehow, the prairie dust gets in your blood, and it flows through your veins until it becomes a part of you. The vast...

From the sky, everything looked fake. The buildings were doll houses. The cars were Matchbox racers. People scuttled about, but they weren’t really people anymore. Their little lives meant absolutely nothing from this altitude.

The young of the town, preoccupied with their own germinating angst, which each possessed in varying degree (though few were ever fully aware of its existence), felt no particular connection to the land, its people,...