All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.

After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.

Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.