The detachment of the artist is kind of creepy. It's kind of rude, and yet really it's where art comes from. It's not the same as courage. It's closer to bad manners than to courage. If you're going to be a writer, you basically have to say, 'this is just who I am'. There's a certain indefensibility about it. It's not about loving your community and taking care of it — you're not attached to the chamber of commerce. It's a little unsafe. You have to be willing to have only four friends, not 11.

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree.

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love.

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.

If one loves stories, then one would naturally love the story of the story. Or the story behind the story, pick your preposition. It does seem to me to be a kind of animal impulse almost, a mammalian curiosity. For a reader to wonder about the autobiography in a fiction may be completely unavoidable and in fact may speak to the success of a particular narrative, though it may also speak to its failure.