If I dont get at least one e-mail every ten minutes, I feel unloved. Even junk mail makes me feel seen. Sad, I know. Sigh.

Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.

What I do is create a lens through my work that corrects my readers' cognitive dissonance and says: you will see all of it - not what you want or what makes you comfortable, but all of it. And you will not erase what displeases you.

My friend Ronald Gottesman says...that the cause of all our trouble is the belief in an essential, pure identity: religious, ethnic, historical, ideological.

People think that writing is writing, but actually writing is editing. Otherwise, you're just taking notes

As with much of the world's problems, they become public--or much more of interest--the moment they begin to impact the West.

What we know about who we are comes from stories. It's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are.