I've been writing fiction as long as I've been writing poetry. It's just that the poetry took off, and it took me a lot longer to figure out how to write a story.

One of my problems with religion is that it's limiting in so many ways. I remember the first time I took a humanities class, I thought, I can't believe this. This is fantastic. This is what I want my life to be. When I was a young person, I did a lot of dabbling in Eastern religions, and it was very satisfying in some ways, but there's that limitation always, which I find myself bridling against.

I think it's really hard to be joyful. I work hard at it. I always feel like it's a choice. You can be joyful or you can be depressed, and there just doesn't seem to be any future in depression.

For 2,500 years, people have been writing odes. Why? I think that there's something innately human in wanting to praise the world even though it's disappointing in so many ways. There's always that tension.

You want to make a representative selection, but at the same time, you want to give a sense of the whole project. I have this big conflict in my writing life that I'm trying to work out all the time.

I've been writing fiction as long as I've been writing poetry. It's just that the poetry took off, and it took me a lot longer to figure out how to write a story.

When I was a young woman, I had this friend who was really beautiful, and she would talk about how she was losing her looks, that she wasn't as pretty as she once was. She was gorgeous, and I thought, I'm going to stop this bad habit of self-criticism that I think a lot of women get into. You make a choice to be different.