Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.

I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.

It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.

I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.

I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes.

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.

I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.