If you act out of a paranoid fear of something happening, you will always make that thing happen.

And then we were kissing.....The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I rally like my body; this cancer-ruined thing I'd spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle.

Half-drunk on well-creamed gas station coffee and the exhilarating loneliness of a freeway in nighttime.

A novel is a conversation between a reader and a writer.

Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories.

This squirrel is inadequately afraid of humans! Squirrel, I am a threat to you! We are enemies! Please get off my bench! Oh, god! Oh, god! Don't touch me—oh, god!

Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering