But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

There's little question that short stories, like poetry, don't get the respect they deserve in the culture - but what can you do? Like Canute, one cannot fight the sea, you have to go with your love, and hope one day, things change.

To produce that identity among young people required guinea pigs.

I think that most of my writer friends are really compulsive. I think that's great. It's wonderful for them. It's just not my bag. It's not the way I work. But again, it's probably why my friend has ten books out and I have two.

...one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away.

The body is what reminds us on a daily basis that we're human. The body defies us, it betrays us, we have to struggle with it, you know. And it reveals in curious and in abiding ways how we are not perfect.

We're accepted as long as we conform to what we are expected to be, and I'm sure that's not any different for anyone else.