I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.

There are many women who write as they think they should write - to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature.

She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.

I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

I acquired that drinker's face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.