How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.

If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

There's a big difference between "not caring" or being "nihilistic" about a topic and simply not being enrolled by the drama presented by other people. Just because my characters choose not to react in standard, socially-appropriate ways - that does not mean they don't care. They just reject ordinary dramas.

The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.

That's what I love about fire, how it would kill me as quick as anybody else. How it can't know I'm its mother. It's so beautiful and powerful and beyond feeling anything for anybody, that's what I love about fire.

For the record, knowing when people are only pretending to like you isn't such a great skill to have.

Public taste changes and the aesthetic of a culture changes over time, so the idea isn't to appeal to the aesthetic of the moment and what people will like right now; the idea is to somehow keep yourself in the public memory so that as taste evolves it will eventually come to embrace your thing. So, it's about writing to be remembered rather than writing to be liked.