We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.

Revision is not the end of the creative process, but a new beginning. It's a chance not just to clean up and edit, but to open up and discover. The energetic prose comes about from all the energy that went into crafting it, I suppose.

Drug programs began to turn their attention and money away from prevention and into maintenance. Methadone was cheaper than social workers, I suppose.

There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.

I sat around the kitchen every Sunday afternoon listening to my mother and aunts talk about the people in the neighborhood. Gossip - I loved it. And that turns out to be the writer's job: to attend to the gossip and spread it as far as you can.