I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other.….

Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryl's health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom ….

Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?.

To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at some….

I'm delighted by how Nobody's Fool turned out. It was a rare movie..

That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most di….

People in small towns, much more than in cities, share a destiny..

I don't think there's a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I've got other stories to te….

What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?.

Whatever you're working on, take small bites. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component..

I think a lot of what is going on with kids who get pushed too far and attempt either murder or suicide is that they are trying to deal with their ow….

It's possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated..

Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it..

You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?.

There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original..

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake..

I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me..

To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be ….

"If you paid me for work," continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, "I wouldn't ….

... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart..

When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well ….