Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that. And living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth.

To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.

Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.

This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next.

If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.

Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.

I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.