We should take a lesson from the Irish potato famine: monocultures are vulnerable. Monocultures of any kind are very vulnerable, because one change and you're cooked. So we should be diversifying, wouldn't you say?

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

You might 'write from the heart,' but you'd better polish with your brain.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.

Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there'd be no stories.

When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.