Think of being curled up and floating in a darkness. Even if you could think, even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite, this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the "Ten Thousand Things"? And if the darkness just got darker? And then you were dead? What would you care? How would you eve know the difference?

In my writing, I want to be laid bare as a human being.

I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision.

English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.

I hate two kinds of sentences you hear in workshops, the ones beginning "I really like ..." and the ones beginning "My problem with this poem is ..."

We’d torn open our chests and shown our cowardly hearts, and you can never stay friends after something like that

Write the unpublishable.. .and then publish it.