We're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.

We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.

If sex is a war, I am a conscientious objector: I will not play.

The ruling class isn't dissatisfied: they are healthy, well-fed, live in beauty, enjoy their own importance: fun-loving cannibals.

The mind wraps itself around a poem. It is almost sensual, particularly if you work on a computer. You can turn the poem round and about and upside down, dancing with it a kind of bolero of two snakes twisting and coiling, until the poem has found its right and proper shape.

I'm probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with them, and had a realistic notion of how they survived.

My grandmother was very important to me. She gave me my religious education. She gave me a sense of the female side of Judaism, of the rich store of stories and legends of the women of the schtetl.