Max Apple

“I carry earplugs and use them even when it's quiet.”

“The things that block a writer are not the lack of words, but the same things that block all people - the difficulties of life.”

“If I'm stuck in the midst of a story, I take a nap. It often works, and if it doesn't, I still feel better.”

“I prefer the plain and simple sentences: the ones that you don't notice because you're so interested in what's happening to the people and events that the sentences are creating.”

“Everything always interests me.”

“I find that most novels are not good all the way through. A story can be good all the way through, every sentence.”

“The story is my favorite form.”

“I've always been writing.”

“Things happen to all of us. The writer's job is to get you interested.”

“Big things always interest me, but the big things don't work because they're too big. You have to find characters in which to couch all those things.”

“I work very hard at each story, at every sentence.”

“As an insecure adult in Houston, a writer struggling to make myself heard, I was nourished by those hours with the Houston Rockets in ways that I did not recognize.”

“As a writer, I live in the world of literature and ideas, but I entered that world as an emigre from a medieval fiefdom, the sports world of Michigan.”

“A volume of stories, bereft of continuity in plot and character, is often unified only by the writer's obsessiveness.”

“I'm not driven. I love writing. My imagination is always working. I write when I have time, and life allows me the time.”