“Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?”

“I write my stories for my children, the best fan club a writer could ever have. They keep me writing and make it fun.”

“My wish has always been to write my own story, to create a life that’s worth writing about. But is a story worth anything at all if I have no one to tell it to?”

“My first inclination is to make my business all about me, but my second instinct is to make my business all about everyone else, because everyone else is where all the money is at.”

“As with most things, my approach to writing has been entirely ass-backwards. I first had to become everything but a writer -- exhaust all possibilities. I had to come to it on my knees. Only when there was truly nothing left, was I able to become a writer.”

“I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.”