It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.

As an artist, you can never get what you want. What you do never approaches what you want it to be.

Life should always be like this. ... Like lingering over a good meal.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

The stupid things you say in the rain, that can't ever be washed away.

I was always mortified.Didn't they know they were tying thier mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?

I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids.