If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.

Pain collected into deep pockets and I was aware of this painbut somehow I could not seem to feel it. It was like a body-deafness.

I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn's rings.

My backyard was replete with madness, it just grew indigenously in South Florida.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations - it's a crazy, wild gift.

The folks I read as a kid really set me up. I owe a huge debt to Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L'Engle.