I discovered John Fante when I was 17 years old - strangely, not through Charles Bukowski, but through William Saroyan, who was his drinking buddy.

Reading is, at its best, not an escape it is genuine experience. A novel is not a monologue, but a conversation, a collaboration between writer and reader, an invaluable exchange of human conditions.

Fobbit is fast, razor sharp, and seven kinds of hilarious. Thank you, Mr. Abrams, for the much needed salve--it feels good to finally laugh about Iraq. Fobbit deserves a place alongside Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 as one of our great comic novels about the absurdity of war.

I usually write in my underwear, with a space heater running full blast, and three dogs sleeping at me feet.

Limited points of view let the writer dispense - and the reader gather - information from various corners of the story. It all becomes a kind of dance, with the writer guiding the reader through the various twists and turns. The challenge is keeping readers in step, while still managing to surprise.

I love being a struggling artist it makes me feel very alive.

You have to find hope. Hope is such a shape shifter. You tend to look in the rearview mirror for hope, but when its gone, you have to look forward. You have to get in the van and keep driving on.

My neediness is not a hole to be filled but something beneath the skin scratching to get out.

I'll never stop caring. But the thing about caring is, it's inconvenient. Sometimes you've got to give when it makes no sense to at all. Sometimes you've got to give until it hurts.

I really believe in challenging myself, pushing myself to new places.

People really do change. Don't let anyone tell you differently. That the future does not conform to the past is not the exception, but the rule.

Can we really be whoever we want to be, now that we’ve collected all that we are?

The Mathematician's Shiva is a brilliant and compelling family saga full of warmth, pathos, history, and humor, not to mention a cast of delightfully quirky characters, and a math lesson or two all together, a winning equation! When Rojstaczer writes about mathematics, you'd think he was writing about poetry.

I know I've lost my mind. But I'm not concerned, because it's the first thing I've lost in a long time that actually feels good.

You have to smile, if you expect anybody to smile back.