I was a great many far cries from myself.

You get tired of always wondering anew why life has to take the place of youth.

Mike Topp is a disablingly funny writer--a miniaturist of nervous precisions, our supreme abridger of metropolitan startlement and inner fidgetry. He dazes and graces us.

What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life.

The writer, as I see it, has the right of way, so it's up to the reader to look out.

My writing isn’t a career or a craft or a hobby or anything like that. It is more like a tiny annex to my life, a little crawl space in which I occasionally end up by accident in the dark.

If I have a problem, it is this: there is a store where everything costs a dollar.

I've been within an inch of my life.

I prefer the sorts of words that go their own way and are very choosy about where they end up. They don't fall for the first frillily syllabled thing to come along.

Desks are terrible places, no matter how many wheels a chair might have. You can't do much about how drawers fill up.

Dylan Nice's Other Kinds is the most extraordinary short-story-col lection debut I have read in years. It is a book to be memorized.

Whenever negativity makes us drip, Inspiration creates a flip from Negative to Positive.

I’d seen a thousand lifetimes come and go, but had never truly lived.

Genuinity is mother of stupidity.

Eternity is not a super-abundance of time, but timelessness.

Back in the mid-1970s, we adopted some fairly ambitious goals to improve efficiency of our cars. What did we get? We got a tremendous boost in efficiency.

(Technology reliability) x (Human reliability) = (System reliability)

The right woman is the one you can live with, not the one in your head.

I'm addicted to Altoids. I call them 'acting pills.'

I think worship is a lifestyle, first of all.

If perfection is stagnation, then Heaven is a swamp.