The garden has taught me to live, to appreciate the times when things are fallow and when they're not.

I am not aware of anything below my neck. I live completely in my head.

I'm trying to earn a living in the way that is most enjoyable to me. I love the world of literature, and I hope to support myself in it.

I like melancholy. I like to pretend that I'm alone in the world and I'm just sort of abandoned.

This naming of things is so crucial to possession - a spiritual padlock with the key thrown irretrievably away - that it is a murder, an erasing, and it is not surprising that when people have felt themselves prey to it (conquest), among their first acts of liberation is to change their names.

If you just sit there, and you're a writer, you're bound to write crap. A lot of American writing is crap. And a lot of American writers are professionals.

I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.