Quotes from Joe Meno

After school the very next day, El Rey's mobile home was gone. I laid in bed and wondered what happens to people when they go, if they become like shadows, if they fade away when they disappear from your life. The only thing I could see was the broken picket fence. The only sound I could hear was the cry of birds being killed in the night.

Maybe it was better to just go on believing everything was OK, even when really bad things were just about to happen.

and realizes how there are all these moments, moments like just this one, there are all these moments, and how everyone lives their lives in these short, all-too-short moments. There are all these moments and what's so interesting, what makes them beautiful, is the fact that none of them last.

I figured Alan wasn't really Alan anymore, that maybe the meds or the disease had made him someone else, someone more timid, someone I actually felt close to. I kept hoping that this would be it, that this would be as bad as it would ever get.

I've been thinking a lot and it's not that anyone did anything wrong. We just didn't know what we wanted. We weren't the people we were supposed to be yet

The last four days where everything has finally made some sense. And why is she so ready to throw this away? Because. Because eventually every relationship she's been in has turned to shit. Eventually she ends up screwing everything up. So maybe it's better to leave now before people's feelings get hurt.

The most important things in your life are almost always impossible to predict.

I tell my students that with a 200-page novel, you are going to write 100 pages that don't make the final cut. See it as an opportunity, although it took me a while to enjoy that 'lost in the woods' feeling.

Most novels put out by small or corporate presses don't really sell that well - usually a thousand copies or so. Working with a small press, you have to be willing to book reading tours, plan events, make contacts with other small press authors, and find new ways of getting word about your new work out there.

What I've learned is that there is nothing in this life that does not fail to disappoint us, even our own deaths.

I would say I have a complicated relationship with institutionalized religion.

When I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, by the time you were 16, you were kind of expected to be an adult. By the time we were 16 and able to drive, certainly by 17 or 18 and into college, you just had very little interaction with your parents.

There's slowly been a kind of shift in how we think about childhood. It's like childhood almost extends to 20 or 22 even after the end of college. When I was growing up, there was this expectation that you were on your own now.

I felt really lucky that 'Hairstyles Of The Damned' and 'The Boy Detective Fails' were both bestsellers, and I thought that donating the money from 'Demons' was a good way to respond to that. My favorite artists are the ones that are willing to experiment, even if it means a smaller audience.

In my fiction, there's a lot that's borrowed from music. It's never like I'm taking a lyric, but more the mood of a particular song. 'The Boy Detective Fails' was like listening to 'Eleanor Rigby' by The Beatles, this very melancholy-but-poppy song.

I have a number of friends that try to live off their writing, and there's way more pressure for a hit or to write a certain type of book. You can't do a limited-edition short-story book with drawings unless you don't want to eat anything but ramen.

I don't think I'm special. I want you to know that," Odile says sharply. "I don't think I'm better than everybody else.

Madeline decides Jonathan is an immature, selfish asshole and that she is never talking to him again.

People are just greedy animals, after all.

I'm still trying to figure things out too. All I know is a couple of very unimportant things.

Imagination is a place where all the important answers live.

How's life?" "That's the stupidest question I've ever heard.

It's pretty hard not to like her," he says. "Even when you know you shouldn't.

I told you why. If I don't do it now, I never will. I'll just be some office drone ten years from now, wishing I had done something interesting at least once in my life.