What someone calls my books is irrelevant to me. I consider them works of art and rules and categories and labels mean nothing.

A miracle is changing someone's life. Freeing them from whatever bonds them. Giving them the gift of being able to live the way they dream of living.

I've always said I'm more influenced in what I do by artists, and how they work, how they think, and the freedom they're given to work and think, than I really am by other writers.

I think as an artist or a writer it's OK to want to control your own work.

There are no words and there is no singing, but the music has a voice. It is an old voice and a deep voice, like the stump of a sweet cigar or a shoe with a hole. It is a voice that has lived and lives, with sorrow and shame, ecstasy and bliss, joy and pain, redemption and damnation. It is a voice with love and without love. I like the voice, and though I can't talk to it, I like the way it talks to me. It says it is all the same, Young Man. Take it and let it be.

I don't speak with proper grammar. I don't speak with dialogue attribution. I don't speak with quotation. I don't care about any of that stuff. It's about rhythm, and it's about what's in their [the character's] head, and what feels more natural. And it's about speed. I want things to move.

Stay. Fight. Live. Take it. Cry. Cry. Cry.