I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do. So, it's usually not too, too hard.

I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.

I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory.

A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.

It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.

My fingers curl through the holes in the wicker, through the wet grass beneath it, trying to hold tight to the sharp blades of the present. Somewhere in my brain a sinkhole is bubbling over, and each bubble contains a scene from a tiny sunken world ... I have never been the prophet of my own past before. It makes me wonder how the healthy dreamers can bear to sleep at all, if sleep means that you have to peer into that sinkhole by yourself. ... I had almost forgotten this occipital sorrow, the way you are so alone with the things you see in dreams.

I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do. So, it's usually not too, too hard.