You're not really going to know what a place is like 'til you've lived there a few years - you sort of just have to go with your gut.

You're not really going to know what a place is like 'til you've lived there a few years - you sort of just have to go with your gut.

While writing is a mystical process, it's also work. If you show up to work five days in a row, nobody's going to pat you on the back - everyone does that. Well, do that with your writing. Just show up. Be there for it. When you get an idea, write it down somewhere and then be a steward of that idea.

There are real teachers out there; I don't pretend to have their mantle.

There's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.

I always worry that I'm a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don't have exhaustive knowledge of much.

Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill.