It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.

It is important not to force a character into something. Fiction writers can be too controlling - usually that's a terror of our own unconscious processes.

What you eat is the most political thing you do every day

What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you. Your first parent was a star.

The ancients believed in fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.

I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.

If I let them take away my demons, I'll have to give up what I've found.