Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.

You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.

I'm of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.

Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.

I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me.

I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.

Cocoa-buttered girls were stretched out on the public beach in apparently random alignments, but maybe if a weather satellite zoomed in on one of those bodies and then zoomed back out, the photos would show the curving beach itself was another woman, a fractal image made up of the particulate sunbathers. All the beaches pressed together might form female landmasses, female continents, female planets and galaxies. No wonder men felt tense.