Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?

As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.

You're never alone with a book, are you? It's a dialogue.

What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.

I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.

No emotion is the final one.

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.