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

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after - lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.

I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.

He had a thousand-year-old stare.

You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.

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.

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