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.

We have that illusion that we are 'deciding' what to make a character do, in order to 'convey our message' or something like that. But, at least in my experience, you are often more like a river-rafting guide who's been paid a bonus to purposely steer your clients into the roughest possible water.

What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.

In a certain way, we're always toggling back and forth between the absolute and the relative, if that makes sense.

I think something that I can't name about our media has made us move away from that kind of specificity and that kind of curiosity.

Even if something within me is ugly, writing is a pretty good place to play with that thing and to begin to really see it.

The writer, in order to proceed, is theoretically trying to predict where his complex skein of language and image has left his reader, who he has likely never met and who is actually thousands of readers.