California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.

I was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.

Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.

People tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember. Writers are always selling somebody out.

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become.

I was four or five, and my mother gave me a big black tablet, because I kept complaining that I was bored. She said, "Then write something. Then you can read it." In fact, I had just learned to read, so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something - and then read it!

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write.