My worst is all out in the open. It makes it necessary for people to tell you about themselves.

Sometimes all that saves me is being willing to make mistakes. There are projects that strike me as so beautiful, important, complicated, or just plain big, that they convince me of my own inadequacy. This awful state of reverence leads to paralyzing brain freeze. At times like that the only way out is for me to decide, 'To hell with it. I can't do it right, so I'll do it wrong. I can't do it well, but I can do it badly.' Sometimes, with luck, while I'm sweating to do it wrong, I stumble on a right way.

Oh, of course, I always feel unconfident.

The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone's comfort

Were also far enough from the publishing power that we have no access to the politics of publishing, although there are interpersonal politics, of course.

Beside Mama, in my own folding chair, with my feet sticking out in front of me, I thought about my own innards. Just a few months before I'd had no idea whether my reproductive equipment worked. There was no evidence. But that week I had become a full-fledged bleeder and was still absorbed by this first change in myself that I had ever noticed. The click and buzz of my synapses kept making the same connection. If you can change, you can also end. Death had always been a theory to me. Now I knew. The terror hurt good and I nursed it and played it like a loose tooth.

There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can't die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land.