I use everything. Turning life into stories is how I make sense of my experience. No matter how weird or disturbing or upsetting to me personally, it all finds its way in there.

I couldn't think of one clever way to stop this guy, so I just trusted to mindless violence.

Sometimes I pretend not to look at my own characters, because that's like different people getting off with your girlfriend or something.

He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infection. And then he pleasured me with a potato.

Your head's like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune's all we are.

I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction.

Life doesn't have plots and subplots and denouements. It's just a big collection of loose ends and dangling threads that never get explained.