No money, holes in my socks, living off oatmeal.

The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.

Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life

Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers - not just literary writers, but popular writers as well - breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class.

It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.