What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

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

The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.

I'm learning to hate the sound of my own voice.

I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale.

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

Life is fundamentally up for grabs