There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.

The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

I know I never work in whatever gets called an office, e.g., a school office I use only for meeting students and storing books I know I'm not going to read anytime soon.

I am not what you see and hear.

Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same.