My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.

There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.

Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.

Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision.

Trust your creativity.