When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.

[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.

[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.

Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.

When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.

Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.