I was a great many far cries from myself.

I learned to read but not to comprehend, and that might well have stood me in good stead, because what's there to understand, really? Everything I later learned to understand was unspeakably ugly anyway. In time, I bought some rulebooks and squeezed my way onto the honor roll, but, decades later, I've been pointed toward people described as "actively dying" who only now and then seemed to be going about it friskily.There was mostly no hustle I could notice.

My writing isn’t a career or a craft or a hobby or anything like that. It is more like a tiny annex to my life, a little crawl space in which I occasionally end up by accident in the dark.

You get tired of always wondering anew why life has to take the place of youth.

The writer, as I see it, has the right of way, so it's up to the reader to look out.

I prefer the sorts of words that go their own way and are very choosy about where they end up. They don't fall for the first frillily syllabled thing to come along.

I have never felt at ease in language. I did not grow up among books or among people who read them. I heard words emerge from mouths but didn't get the hang of how people hung the things out as if on lines to get their gripes and recreational distempers yowlingly known.