Reading and thoughtfulness and openness are the best way, I should think, to begin to address the richness that is in each of us.

I admit that for me love goes deeper than the struggle, or maybe what I mean is, love is the deeper struggle.

Depression is always in the details.

It's like my whole world is coming undone, but when I write, my pencil is a needle and thread, and I'm stitching the scraps back together.

Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.

But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention.

I grew up in a dictatorship, where you couldn't talk about difficult situations - there was this culture of silence. We would run into a problem and have no one to talk to.