Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.

Sex makes things strained. There are lovely people in Oneida, but everyone was married to everyone else. And you had fathers and mothers watching their twelve-year-old daughters being inducted into the group marriage by sixty-five-year-old men. There are creepy aspects of a lot of intentional communities when it comes to sex.

It's not easy to make friends when you're an adult writer outside of academia, especially when you work alone in a little room for twelve hours a day, and so I wrote toward what I most longed for.

Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.

Sex is a good starting point for everything.

I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.