I like playing with a popular cliché and making it my own by half-embracing it, half-disemboweling it.

A friend of mine urged me to see my pain as an opportunity. And since the same psychic that contacted Dion Fortune had told me that I was a "teacher" - she didn't mean at Columbia, she meant in the spiritual sense - I decided my affliction was the universe telling me that it was time to stop writing fiction and become the spiritual guru I was clearly meant to be.

Every once in a while when I get a migraine, I like to think, "Who hates me today?"

As a writer, you want to go somewhere else sometimes. You want to vary the terrain that you're exploring.

I obviously read and adore traditional fiction. I teach traditional fiction; I also teach all kinds of not-so-traditional fiction.

We're taught to find the antecedents to our adult failures in childhood traumas, and so we spend our lives looking bacwards and pointing fingers, rather than bucking up and forging ahead. But what if your childhood was all a big misunderstanding? An elaborate ruse? What does that say about failure? Better yet, what does that say about potential?

I really did for a few weeks think, I'm in pain because the world needs me to save it. Which is so ridiculous and egotistical.