She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.

The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.

My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.

It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.