We have a huge struggle for our sense of what a democracy is. We're not living in reality when we think we have some sort of democracy. We're really on the edge. We have two presidents who lost the popular vote but won the election. This is not working.

I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can't picture.

Don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

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.

The Internet, which seems now so embedded and personal and crucial to our lives, isn't at all - we really shouldn't think of it that way.

It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.