When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.

I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.

Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear.

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.

I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you're not writing.

The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.