Do what you want to do, and don't worry if it's a little odd or doesn't fit the market.

I don't pare down much. I write the beginning of a story in a notebook and it comes out very close to what it will be in the end. There is not much deliberateness about it.

There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn to love a person while continuing to be selfish.

Like a tropical storm, I, too, may one day become ‘better organized.

So the question really is, Why doesn't that pain make you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don't.

There is something very pleasing about the principles of science and the rules of math, because they are so inevitable and so harmonious - in the abstract, anyway.

I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.