Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.
Could we betray our parents by going back to them?
My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.
You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.
It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.
Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.
If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.
There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.
It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.
Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.
I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory.
Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself.
I often felt myself to be an outsider, which is great training for all writers.
I tended to be drawn to the weirder, darker stuff. Horror and sci-fi anthologies.
My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.
The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.
If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.
I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.
I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.
Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.
You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu.
My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.
The folks I read as a kid really set me up. I owe a huge debt to Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L'Engle.
I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.
What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.
But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.
Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.
When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.
It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations - it's a crazy, wild gift.
I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do. So, it's usually not too, too hard.
I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.
I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.
A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.
I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.
Pain collected into deep pockets and I was aware of this painbut somehow I could not seem to feel it. It was like a body-deafness.
Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.
For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.
My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.
It's funny, for a long time I would go watermelon-red and deny that I was a magical realist. It felt imprecise to me, a misrepresentation.
I am extremely close to my brother, Kent, and my sister, Lauren, who have been remarkably understanding about all of my weird sibling tales.
I didn’t realize that one tragedy can beget another, and another — bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.
Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.
Sometimes, when you're writing sentence by sentence, you're not really sure what footprints you're going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear.
I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.
At the end of the block where I used to live in Coconut Grove in Miami, there's a swampy area, a no-name alcove with a little mangrove estuary. It's beautiful.
I'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.
Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.
In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.
So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum.
I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn's rings.