It’s our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don’t read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn’t some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui. It’s hard to make this case, though, if all we do is squabble with each other and lament our obscurity. – Steve Almond at The Rumpus

(T)he Web can you leave you feeling lonelier, once you turn off the computer. Fiction and poetry connect you, or they can, to something bigger and quieter and more lasting than the day you had at work. – Lorin Stein at the The Atlantic

Why not me  down the street hanging out with my dementia-struck father who does not remember me anymore but probably has only years or a year or months or weeks or minutes left to live. Everyone does. Why am I not with everyone. – Blake Butler at HTMLGIANT

The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a motherfucker. It is not fragility. It’s strength. - Dear Sugar on women writers at The Rumpus

Every day is a gift. I am probably wasting that gift. – Roxane Gay on writing at Bent Country

Everyone is merging into one voiceless narrator with the same slang and the same profanity and the same popular cultural references. – Stephen Elliott on Tao Lin at The Rumpus

She whispered that a man could make an unknowing whore of any woman, even ladies, just by what was in his heart when he was with her. – Joseph Scapellato at The Collagist

We stood there, watching the rat wriggle through its death throes. Finally, the animal control guy looked at me and said, quietly, “cycle of life, man.” – Sam McPheeters at Loom of Ruin

To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not? – Christopher Hitchens on cancer at Vanity Fair

I have more ideas than I have time. The trick is picking the right idea, the thing that most needs to be made… I give every project as much time and thought as I can. I take every project to whatever extreme that I can find.I – Michael Kimball at Dark Sky Magazine