In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.

Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own.

I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.

She's sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.

Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

- Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself. - But your yourself sucks! - It is, lamentably, all I have.