The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do.

I hate feelings. Why does sobriety have to come with feelings?

The past doesn't haunt us, we haunt the past.

And I tend to listen to NPR when I'm not writing.

Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.

I never question the way I write. Writing is the only thing that's without seams for me. It's an effort to talk because my pictures have to be turned into these sounds. It's an effort to be alive. It's work. But writing is wonderful.

I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.