"The short stories of Flannery O’Connor landed hard on me. You could feel within them the unknowability of God, the intangible mysteries of life that confounded her characters, and which I find by my side every day. They contained the dark Gothicness of my childhood and yet made me feel fortunate to sit at the center of this swirling black puzzle, stars reeling overhead, the earth barely beneath us."

"I once took a girlfriend to see this movie, after which she complained that it was the most depressing film she’d ever seen. I should’ve known right then and there that our relationship was doomed. It depicts the harsh toll of loneliness, humiliation, and indifference to the suffering of others; what it’s like to live in a world where empathy is in short supply (which is usually the case)."

"This just happened to be the one of Green’s novels that floated to the Favorite position in my mind today, but they rotate. Really, in my opinion, these peerlessly eccentric, comparatively short marvels, which are so bafflingly different from each other as well as from everything else, should be considered parts of a whole. Loving is the most visual of them, but each has its own extraordinary qualities."

"[Brackett] was my teacher. I imitated her, of course. She had those beautiful short stories in Planet Stories about John Stark, they were all Edgar Rice Burroughs par excellence. In other words, she could write better than Burroughs. She took the same sort of things he did: the fighting man of Mars, the gods of Mars, the Martian stories, but gave them that extra ambiance, style, and imagination."