Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.

In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

You can't find intimacy - you can't find home - when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.

It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.

For a long time, I let my mother say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.

Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly.

I'm part of the people who are more neutral. I'm just waiting for the dust to settle so that we can turn our guns against the Republicans.