Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.

What I mean is sometimes, for an artist, chronic pain can be a gift.

With the novels, I usually start from something in my own life that I can't resolve, so I turn it into a metaphor and for months or sometimes years I'll exhaust all of my emotional reaction to this issue by making it enormous on the page.

Parents are like God because you wanna know they're out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something.

Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.

If it is the case that love does survive death, then you may consider this to be a happy ending. Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Happily ever after or not.

Nobody's told me anything to date that I've been completely reviled by.