Life is really pretty tricky, and there's a lot of loss, and the longer you stay alive, the more people you lose whom you actually couldn't live without.

It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.

I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends' mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.

We're out there somewhere between the known and the unknown, trying to reel in both for a closer look.

No matter what circumstances, it's hard to be a parent and maintain a sense of self and identity in the world.

If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.

I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.