From the far corner of the living room, our four-year-old G piped up and said, “We should get rid of all my toys, too. I don’t really need them.” So, we did.

He sits in it all the time. Usually, it’s an alien spaceship or a Pokémon ball or a house or a bed. Today, it was the casket for his baby-doll’s father. (So… him.)

Know what happens in a bookstore at night once everyone has left? This is awesome.

Optimism and faith. Maybe they’re the same. Whatever be the names of the things that make us stronger, make us better, make us stretch into whoever it is we’re becoming, I wish them all for you.

It was adrenaline and restless sleep, being banished from the living room, overhearing the adults joking and wrapping. It was the feeling of flying, knowing you’d be safely caught.

This is how it REALLY is. Unfortunately.

Fiction readers do not want role models. They want to read about themselves. And no one is the antagonist in his own movie.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer.

Everything is material.

~~Philip Roth, novelist