“Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he ...” — Rebecca Makkai Quote

Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.

I have the distinct feeling that when I'm old, and I look back on my life, my thirties will be one huge blur. There's a lot that gets neglected: exercise, dishes, laundry, my poor garden. I try to prioritize the important but non-urgent things over the unimportant but urgent things.

We're all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos. And that's what art is.

In a short story, you can use someone - we're only going to be with that person for maybe 10 pages, and they can have sort of a one note personality. And in a novel, you need to have arrows pointing more than one direction for that person.

The political lesson of Watergate is this: Never again must America allow an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents to by-pass the regular party organization and dictate the terms of a national election.

There's a huge adolescent side to me that I can't grow out of.

Anyone who has ever been an ugly adolescent - and we are legion - knows that the feeling of being unlovely and unlovable never goes away; it is always there, lurking just beneath the surface.

Fighting for kids has been my lifelong mission. Right out of high school, I went to work at a camp that served disadvantaged adolescents. When I became a recreation therapist, I worked with children battling severe mental illness.