I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.

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

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

The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good.

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

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.

I've worked behind counters serving food, and I've lived on the circus train, and I've led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I've been a key liner for a newspaper, I've done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.