fiction is the great lie that tells the truth

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

Don't go taking that gospel stuff seriously. It's nice to clean you out now and then, but it ain't for real. It's like bad whiskey. Run through you fast and leave you with pain.

I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto-God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.

It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.