Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.

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.

My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.

I'm gregarious with writers and never with manuscripts . . . I [like to] create the illusion of seamless perfection, so I alone know the flawed homely process along the way.

It was only as I wrote about fear that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.

I don't have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I'm doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs.