Somebody once said to me if you want to be understood, don't write fiction.

What are you thinking?” She asks. -That you are beautiful. That not everyone could see it. I almost became the kind of person who could not.

Of course there’s something there; unfortunately, there’s always something ‘there.’ Something you will one day be sorry you saw.

Whenever young writers ask me for advice, I always say you have to be able to take a lot of rejection because, unless you're very lucky, that's what's going to happen.

Even happy situations can easily start to feel miserable. So, I think that people who consider themselves sophisticated or who are in fact sophisticated have come to distrust stories that are uplifting or simply stories in which the characters get what they want in the end. Because in life, what you want is never the end.

I can be very in my head, but I don't trust my head all that much. My head is crazy. My head will talk to itself all day and all night if I let it. And my heart is less nutty, but it's kind of like an overexcited child. I don't trust my heart all that much either. My body is like a good horse. I trust my body.

Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.