What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?

Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.

Nine-tenths of human law is about possession.

I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them.

Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.

I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.