I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. If you don't do anything with it, you lose it.

What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes...

There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance.

But who knows what good might come from the least of us? From the bones of old horses is made the most beautiful Prussian Blue.

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.

The writer trusts nothing she writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head.

As you grow older, you'll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.