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

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.

When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.

Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.

I don't know why the world has changed so much that writers are now expected to appear in public and talk about their work. It's something I find very difficult. And yet, one does have some sense of responsibility towards one's publishers, to the people trying to sell the book.

I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts.

To the resentment that hides inside love, to the loneliness that hides among companions.