Michelle Richmond:

(The Sunday lunch crowd in the Deep South has surely done more to tarnish the reputation of fundamentalist Christians than Ted Haggard and Jim Bakker combined.)

Don't Quit Your Day Job, p. 179

Michelle Richmond:

What writer hasn't imagined the moment of recognition, when the impersonal sentences on the page begin to clarify, to coalesce, and the reader looks inside the story and sees himself?

Don't Quit Your Day Job, p. 184

Michelle Richmond:

I always believed that a writer, no matter how she makes her living, is a very lucky person.  Because a writer can take any unpleasantness, any drudgery, any sadness, any comic madness, gather words around that thing, and spin it out into the world like a Frisbee.

Don't Quit Your Day Job, p. 184

Michelle Richmond:

Being poor per se may not make a person a better writer, but there's a good chance that financial hardship, and a childhood and young adulthood spent on the wrong end of the class struggle, makes a person a more careful observer of humanity.

Don't Quit Your Day Job, p. 180