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.

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

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 was a great many far cries from myself.

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.

Love is our most basic human value and also our highest potential.

... most of my prayers are expressions of sheer gratitude for the fullness of my contentment.

Well, you know, I'm the forever optimist.

I have real admiration for chefs who can maintain an edge and find new inspiration in their cooking after many years.

In the world of Internet Customer Service, it's important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.

Not every person is going to understand you and that's okay. They have a right to their opinion and you have every right to ignore it.

I wish I had eight pairs of hands, and another body to shoot the specimens.

I don't have children, but I imagine if parents are really pushed on the subject, they probably have favorite children.

Music keeps time and defies time, simultaneously.

There is an immediate payoff to intelligent design: it destroys the atheistic legacy of Darwinian evolution. Intelligent design makes it impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.