Everyone wants to give a writer the perfect notebook. Over the years, I’ve acquired stacks.
“There’s no such thing as a perfect murder,” Tom said to Reeves. “That’s just a parlor game, trying to dream one up. Of course you could say there are a lot of unsolved murders. That’s different.” Tom was bored.
I have been waiting for you. Since before her birth, since before my spark took hold and ignited the fire in her mother’s belly, I have been training to kill you.
I want to touch you like people want to jump off Niagara Falls. The rush is worth the, “Holy fuck!”
My mother thinks I’m dead. Obviously, I’m not dead, but it’s safer for her to think so.
Because of the nature of my illness, and its effect on my brain, I remember only flashes of actual events, and brief but vivid hallucinations, from the months in which this story takes place.
My grandma kick the shit out of your grandma. My grandma thorough.
Alice asks me if I remember how it all began. I tell her that we were on our way to pick her up from kindergarten the day that the news broke. The day that the Sriracha factory closed.
Everyone remembers Taft as our fattest President. The teachers telling us the story of how Taft once got stuck in his own bathtub.
Tales of groundbreaking innovation sound a lot alike. Like action-adventure movies, they have a predictable structure.
David Fincher in a bad mood isn’t easy to discern from David Fincher in a good mood. Fincher tired is the same as Fincher energized.
Your husband owns a clinic that offers to cure homosexuality for up to $10,000 a year. So when you, Representative Bachmann, refused to acknowledge the bullying of gay students in your district, this must have been strictly business.
If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.
Fat girl, fat jokes. Fat girl, skinny friends. Fat girl, stand next to fatter people to look thin. Fat girl, fat camp, five years. Fat girl lost two pounds and you didn’t notice.
It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.
Yo, I caught you trying to take my mother’s feet. You made Aunt Glenda’s arms open up in the bathroom, blood ran the floor like a point guard.
I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.
“In animal life the weak are quickly disposed of.”
Truth be told, I’m not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one, though it’s been my experience that most people don’t want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.
I don’t know how I should live. I don’t know how anyone should live. All I know is how I do live. I live like a peeled snail. And that’s no way to make money.
Up in the morning, I feel the immediate beat of my heart that is speeding up, feeding a demon that’s seeking to eat at my being.
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army. Visiting Kathy’s grave was the less dramatic of the two.
The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth.
Listen, here’s the thing: If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table… then you are the sucker.