Talent is more erotic when it's wasted.

A novel determines its own size and shape and I've never tried to stretch an idea beyond the frame and structure it seemed to require.

As technology advances in complexity and scope, fear becomes more primitive.

If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.

You live in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God.

In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.