Every year at Christmas time my mother asks the family the same question. "What is your most memorable Christmas gift?" My father recalls a bicycle that he received when he was in his pre-teen years. He was somewhat displeased at the time, since this present was his sole Christmas gift and his other siblings seemed …
At the all-knowing age of 13, I developed a purely hormonal crush on a neighbor girl who I admired from afar. Completely infatuated, my thoughts were plagued with trembling scenarios of what I would do once I earned enough money from my paper route (which paid only slightly more than the average Ugandan Day Laborer's …
"If I'm really low, if I'm not doing well in my own life, maybe I want to sit down and go somewhere else. Maybe I want to write about a ridiculous family reunion in Nebraska, to not be in whatever my present emotion is."
"If you stopped to think about the ironies, you wouldn't get very far in any kind of media business in this day and age."
"You have to be pretty honest to be a fiction writer. You have to be smart enough to see the world for yourself and honest. The whole book-publicity thing is not really honest, at base."
"Punish the guilty. Do justice to the victims. It's not to ask very much. This is a rich society that won the Cold War. It has nothing to fear from this inquiry. That's what justice would look like."
When you die, you will look back
upon the motley, hurley-burley carnival
with a tiny pentagram of wry compassion
in your open, trusting eye
As human beings and writers, we are questioning the power of ink in altering the headline news. Some editors and publishers consider a literary call to arms a prerequisite, a necessary step in the global healing process; others find it a tacky, trite, and opportunistic maneuver toward personal publicity, rather like dressing up bloodshed for …
When I first thought that my musings might be good fodder for a column, if nothing else than to serve as a public forum for my self-obsession, I immediately began worrying that people would think I was trying to emulate the very successful Candace Bushnell and her "Sex & The City" legacy, or at least …
"The rich know almost nothing about the poor. They don't clean their houses. Whereas the poor can turn on TV, not only house cleaners, and see how the rich live. And if you are a house cleaner you know exactly how individual rich people live."
