I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.

Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.

So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.

He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.

I want the younger writer to know that she or he is meaningful, that what they have to say is powerful in this world. But they can't come indoors, they can't close the curtains, they can't, like, lock themselves away from the world and say nothing.

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.