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.

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

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.

It was my mother who taught me the one worthwhile thing: when they ask if you like what you see in the mirror, pretend that what they mean is what's behind you--the shower curtain, the tile, the wallpaper, whatever's there.

Desks are terrible places, no matter how many wheels a chair might have. You can't do much about how drawers fill up.

I've been within an inch of my life.

I was a great many far cries from myself.