Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.

The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language.

Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.

As before, there is a great silence, with no end in sight. The writer surrenders, listening.

Love is the outlaw's duty.

The writing life is a secret life, wither we admit it or not.

I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.