In depression, you're flattened. Your energy level is gone. When I'm anxious, I tend to have more energy. But it depends on the nature of the anxiety. The anxiety to finish something would seem to be more productive than the anxiety that says, "You're feeling sick."

I don't believe a picture is worth a thousand words, unless they're very confusing words.

The Dutch and the English, former competitors for world dominance, taught me the wisdom of waiting as well as withholding.

You have to create the space for the possibility of people speaking as they do. If writing is supposed to lead us in any way or educate or suggest other ways of being, it can't do so by simply reflecting what's considered to be realistic.

You learn to read in kindergarten or first grade, and suddenly there's this other world that isn't your family or your school or your friends. It's something else.

I think it's very hard to reconcile oneself to the notion that it may not matter what you think if you still want to write.

I think there's much more privileging of the new in art. I think people want to think they privilege the new in writing, but I agree with Virginia Woolf. She wrote a great essay called "Craftsmanship" about how difficult it is to use new words. It's really hard, but you see them coming in because obviously, if you're going to write... I mean, even to write "cell phone" in a novel - it's so boring.