Whether you're eighteen or sixty, in a certain way, whatever you know is valid.

Success is like a mountain in front of you that keeps growing. If you're not careful, it will take up your whole life.

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

Let's say there's something operating in you called Mind. It's very powerful, but it's dampened by the body, by physicality. When you die, that tether gets cut and off the mind goes with incredible power.

I really wanted to be allowed to the [writer's] table. So it makes me happy to be at the table. It sounds a little shallow, but if I imagine the shadow life, where I didn't get that chance, and all the ways my negative inclinations would have bloomed if I hadn't gotten the attention, but also the creative outlet ... I'm not actually that happy. I have multiplicities. My happiness blooms and it wilts.

To me, the process of writing is just reading what I've written and - like running your hand over one of those mod glass stovetops to find where the heat is - looking for where the energy is in the prose, then going in the direction of that. It's an exercise in being open to whatever is there.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that whatever weirdness was going to be in there, I felt, had to be earned. And it had to be required by the emotional needs of the book.