“It’s not what happens to people on the page; it’s about what happens to a reader in his heart and mind.”

“Don't have stories; have sentences.”

“...I have come to be convinced that it is only the unbending observance of custom that sustains life in an urban circumstance.”

“He came to chat with me the day of my being discharged, advising that I not stay at the dog fight until the last dog was dead. I was a kid and made little counsel. Now that I am a bigger kid, I see the value--belatedly--added. Yet I also see the loss of life in the protecting, first of all, of oneself. Better to give oneself away. Dead f*ck the dog and so on.”

“That’s what happens when you force someone to choose. Maybe they pick option A, maybe they pick option B, but most will go for a third option that isn’t asking them to pick favorites in the first place.”

“Life is a series of calculated risks, James. I happen to think that this one is worth it.”

“Sometimes life offers you up that kind of dichotomy, that soul-shearing rift of two very different things happening at once.”