You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.

...Don't rupture another's illusion unless you're positive the alternative you offer is more worthwhile than that from which you're wrenching them. Interrogate your solipsism: Does it offer any better a home than the delusions you're reaching to shatter?

The level at which my OCD enters my writing process isn't that I slap the keyboard - it's more along the lines of a compulsive need to swap syllables around, rework words and sentences - I revise for the pleasure and satisfaction of it, rather than out of a sense of duty.

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 met someone who lives in an elevator.

With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you're on page 300. You can't do that with film. It just charges ahead.

I listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the art forms that I do master and domesticate, and have authority over.