Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu.

But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.

I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.

I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather. One such melting occurs in summer rain, at midnight, during the vine-green breathing time right before sleep. You have to ask the right question, throw the right rope bridge, to get there-and then bolt across the chasm between you, before your bridge collapses.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.