Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort - good food or junk food - and one assumes it all goes in and has its way with your brain cells.

If prose can cast a spell, we will listen to it no matter what it's saying. If a narrative uses language in a magical and enlivening way, we will listen to the story. But if the language doesn't cast a spell, we will listen to it only if it is telling us something that actually happened.

Twenty-year-olds have a kind of emotional idealism about relationships and about the world that enables them to say, 'No, you lied to me. Goodbye.' When they see wickedness, they walk away.

Editing is just ongoing. I don't count drafts, or know what would fully constitute a draft. But I try to fix as I go. And there's always more to fix.

Those are the love killers. They love you and then they kill you. They're from another planet. Supposedly.

The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches.

I do have people in mind when I write. I don't know precisely who they are, however, or how many of them there are.