I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.

Goodbye. I am leaving because I am bored.

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others).

I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

I've been reading about and writing about the Civil War period and it is so striking that slavery was never made right - [Abraham] Lincoln was killed, Reconstruction came along, and all of that inequity was frozen in place and carried forward rather smugly. So I think the burden is now upon us white people, to say that this systemic inequality offends us.

My heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.