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.

Some people tell me they would be afraid of my characters, but I tell those people [that] they meet these characters all the time. They just don't care about them when they meet them, at the gas station, the car wash, the post office even.

I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns.

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

I was never a big reader as a kid. My imagination wasn't captured by books very often. It was captured more often by boys and partying and riding horses.

I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn't do it, then you were out of luck.

Donkeys are the most misunderstood and abused animals around the world.