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I used bravado to protect myself when we lived in poverty.

We caress the rough. Sensuous, delectable, and yet sorrowful.

Widow. I look up the etymology. To separate, split, cleave, divide.

Tobias Wolff reading his story "Bullet in the Brain" and Helen Gu reads her poem "Mooncakes" aloud.

The thought of entertaining our relatives filled me with horror.

Identify where you came from, where you are, and where you wish to go.

You can go from one town square to another and never fall in love.

Since I was little I was always wondering, What makes people tick?

Fitzgerald was about to turn thirty and felt the press of time.

Ah, yes, Rita reminded herself: I won. Her Mistress of Mayhem award.

Always know the creative life begins again and again.

I am always hungry & wanting to have sex. This is a fact.

If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.

It is natural that the novelist should doubt his ability to cope with his task.

The story is filled with demarcations, limits, invisible as well as overt.

I’m a theatrical lyricist. I would never choose to look fat in public.

Frank Conroy

Audio clips of Pultizer Prize winner Jennifer Egan on her work.

How many times had I passed it in a taxicab or walked within sight of it?

Ring, ring, ring at 2 a.m. means meth’s got my brother in the slammer again.

The rich man adorns himself and the elegant man gets dressed.

Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

“You look like you’re about to fall over,” he says. “Are you all right?”

Youth! Goodness! Joy! Hope! Strange things to bring to a place like this.

I am trying not to want to want to. Trying not to doing wall sits in the poetry room.

What right does an American mutt like me have to depict in fiction the lives of a Salvadoran family?

Her knees seemed about to give way, and he quickly grabbed her elbow.