Why do people think that we’re degraded when we’re examining positions of degradation, or examining the cycle of our own degradation?

No one...can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy's involuntary, there's terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people.

I think what makes you feel so connected with certain writers isn't a matter of autobiographical detail, but that the emotions are real. The way some writers are able to channel themselves through the form.

Ask anyone who makes a full-length movie that's shown in the art world if they'd rather have a career as a film director or as an artist. Invariably, they'd rather be known as a film director, because that's what they are. But there's not really a system of independent distribution anymore that allows for that, and so the art world has kind of become all-enveloping. It's absorbed all of these disciplines that don't have a home anymore.

I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructiv e but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.

Writing can be bad and still be part of something good. That 'art' is really 'artifact,' Exhibit A, Exhibit B, of something else: a person's whole experience and life. And that always there's the chance that this will fail. That things will not work out.

I think writers always want to be taken seriously as writers, but it's not always possible. There's a difference between persistence and banging your head against the same wall a hundred times. Sometimes it's better to look away from the wall and see what else might be available that's easier.