I sometimes felt as if these marks on my body were a kind of code, which blossomed, then faded, like invisible ink held to a candle. But if they were a code, who held the key to it? I was sand, I was snow — written on, rewritten, smoothed over.

The young habitually mistake lust for love, they're infested with idealism of all kinds.

We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.

There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.

Anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; if they didn't kill birds and fish they would have killed us. The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people, hunters in the fall killing the deer, that is Christ also. And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life. Canned Spam, canned Jesus, even the plants must be Christ.

No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.