I've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone..

If the reader enters a kind of immersive experience reading a book, then I have to enter a kind of immersive state to do my best work..

What occurs after revelation and paralysis?.

Silence creates it's own violence..

I like to go through the zine sections of local bookstores when on the road and have found a lot of really great kind of underground stuff that way. ….

Dreams, though, are just one kind of inspiration - no more or less special than something in a newspaper article or from the world around you sparkin….

It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great lit….

My best time to write is right after coffee and breakfast - four eggs because, full disclosure: I'm really a komodo dragon - and that's because then ….

Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you. You can create little islands of time away from your novel t….

The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?.

Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth..

Some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough..

The world is a mysterious place and the very limitation of our senses in exploring it means we are sometimes aware of there being something beyond ou….

I find myself in this bizarre position in which everything I write and talk about is pretty much about this issue, the environment. It feels a little….

You can be deeply non-serious and still focused, disciplined, and on task..

All musical talent is absent in me, to the point of being unable to play board games that require you to hum a tune while others guess what it is, si….

Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading..

The best visual book I can think of is Lynda Barry's What It Is, but although I refer to it all the time it's not a creative writing book per se..

Imbuing fiction with a life that extends beyond the last word is in some ways the goal: the ending that goes beyond the ending in the reader's mind, ….

So many differing opinions and philosophies... are rarely housed under the roof of a single magazine..

When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality..