When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.

You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.

There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.

I feel like so much of what I'm doing is making a road where there is no road and inviting people on that road with me. It's scary. It's scary, but I can't listen to the voices that are saying form is the only way, or that there is only this kind of form or that kind of form.

Mama was always saying I was a brain snob, that I didn't like people who didn't think. I didn't know if that was snobby. Who wanted to walk around explaining everything to people all the time?

Don't trust women, my mother said to me. Even the ugly ones will take what you thought was yours.

I always say I write because I have lots of questions, not because I have any answers.