When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.

But I knew one more thing. That people w ho denied who they were or where they had been were in the greatest danger.

In our exterior life, we can be only one person. But in our imagination, we can be anyone, anywhere.

I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.

A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.

Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.

I imagined my soul taking in these words like silicated water in the Petrified Forest, turning my wood to patterned agate. I liked it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.