I try to tell student writers to read as much as possible, not only literature but philosophy, theory, and to form obsessions. There's a big taboo in fiction creative writing workshops against using the self at all, and I think I try to encourage students to write the self, but to connect the self to something larger, which is to be this thinking, seeing, searching, eternally curious person, and that writing can come out of investigating and trying to understand confusion, and doubts, and obsessions.

The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness.

I always remember my childhood as traumatic, for various reasons; I always felt alienated, outside.

When I get too worked up about things I have always escaped into catatonia.

All of my wildness is in the writing. I have discovered I have to be orderly and boring in my personal life to be wild in my work.

With fiction, the works of women are often over-interpreted as autobiography, especially when the main character is a woman, especially if she is seen as privileged.

Patriarchy is having the power to name.