If you can be anything else but a writer, be it.

Whenever I get lost in a novel I just throw a poem in. What it does is flare up, and it's so illuminated that I'm able to see where to go. I write between these illuminations.

I have a great ability to improvise verbally and I am very funny on a dime.

I write a lot by sound. One sound leads me to another. These sounds aren't random; they have their own logic.

All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.

The Peruvian flute music is . . . cool. In this music, they have not yet invented the industrial revolution that leads to excessive punctuality or the failed experiment they call the nuclear family. This is the music of elements, untarnished, unrehearsed.

To be one woman, truly, wholly, is to be all women. Tend one garden and you will birth worlds.