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

Most of the nations that have serious gardening cultures have, or had, empires. You can't have this luxury of pleasure without somebody paying for it. This is nice to know. It's nice to know that when you sit down to enjoy a plate of strawberries, somebody got paid very little so that you could have your strawberries. It doesn't mean the strawberries will taste different, but it's nice to enjoy things less than we do. We enjoy things far too much, and it leads to incredible pain and suffering.

In my writing I'm trying to explore the violations people commit upon each other.

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.

if I'd thought that nobody would like it as I was writing it, I would have written it even more. But I never think of the audience. I never think of people reading. I never think of people, period.

That the world I was in could be soft, lovely, and nourishing was more than I could bear, and so I stood there and wept, for I didn't want to love one more thing in my life, didn't want one more thing that could make my heart break into a million little pieces at my feet.

when people say you're charming you are in deep trouble.