Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.

To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.

If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.