“The successful memoirist [blogger] respects facts, uses them accurately, rigorously represses the human impulse to lie or embellish, but knows that truth is both different from facts and greater than facts, and not always their sum.”

When a new writer defends his “style,” the teacher smiles (or cringes) because real style isn’t an artifice. Real style – voice – arrives on its own, as an extension of a writer’s character.

When style is done self-consciously and purposefully it becomes affectation, and as transparent as any affectation – an English accent on an old college chum from New Jersey, for example.

Blues is a natural fact, is something that a fellow lives. If you don’t live it you don’t have it.

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.

Evolution is a theory, and it’s a theory that you can test. We’ve tested evolution in many ways. You can’t present good evidence that says evolution is not a fact.

If there’s any mystery to me at all, it’s probably due to the fact that I’m not online and don’t go to conventions–which means that I’m probably not as accessible to fans as most writers are these days. If that makes me seem like a weird recluse, so be it.

The fact is that the Vietnamese held Americans after 1973.

A common misconception is that the costs of health care are cheaper in rural America, when in fact the reality is that they are more expensive and more difficult to access.

The single fact of existing is already a true happiness.

In fact, so much of life, as you know, is serendipitous. That’s why you better be prepared at any time for anything, because it may happen to you.