Writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions.

There's never any percentage in being ahead of your time.

Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I've got Tourette's. My mouth won't quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I'm reading aloud, my Adam's apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks of empty breath and tone.

You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry.

I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism - clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information - facts, more than just the surfaces of things.