“My thought is always, ‘It’s only downhill from here.’ That’s how I’ve always operated, ever since I began Family Guy. I had the crippling fear that I used up all the funny last week. That crippling… Read More
“A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.”— P.J. O’Rourke Swimming first with the counterculture, P.J…. Read More
“I always find there’s a kind of serendipity to research. I’m a generalist, so one of the things that compels me to a story is addressing my own ignorance.”— David Grann I came across this… Read More
“That’s what books are, they’re containers for memory. They’re containers for the stories of the past. It’s an artifact that allows you to communicate with the past… I would imagine most writers have this sense… Read More
“One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or… Read More
“Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.”— Oliver Herford The quote of the day is about something freelancers will know well. It’s also, alas, a bit of an anachronism. Gifted in multiple ways… Read More
“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others… Read More
“I don’t know if anyone has noticed but I only ever write about one thing: being alone. The fear of being alone, the desire to not be alone, the attempts we make to find our… Read More
“I learned this lesson too late, frankly: Do not judge it while you’re doing it. Do not go back and fix things that are 20 pages ago when you’re already 20 pages past that. You’ll… Read More
I have written plenty of obituaries over my time, and by that I mean news stories about public figures whose lives were remarkable. I also wrote or edited many articles involving death. There’s a language… Read More
“Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the… Read More
“I did scary things like that when I was a young woman. I had all of my 20s to fail. I wanted to be a stand-up and then I wanted to be Lily Tomlin. I… Read More
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”— Jack London The stroke of genius, the bolt of blue, the eureka moment: so much of our culture has various threads… Read More
“Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea forever.”— Will Self A quote like this… Read More
Two weeks ago, I launched this website, and with it a revived form of Dot Dot Dot, a blog I first started, um, 22 years ago. (Two weeks, 22 years; time is a construct, right?)… Read More