All our stories are part invention - the way we've decided to make sense of what has happened.

It has been my experience that the people I judge most harshly are the ones in whom I recognize some part of myself.

Sometimes I see my students, especially the ones with a gift for the lyrical, reaching far outside the realm of their own experience for language and images. I understand this impulse. We think, in the beginning, that striking exotic words together will create something entirely new. That we must be worldly in our vocabulary. We idolize the styles of other writers and don't trust or perhaps yet know our own.

S&M is just a set of practices that get classified as a single category, when more accurately they are a part of much larger set of behaviors: expressions of love, and self, and play, and even art. There is no hard line between "vanilla" sex and S&M sex, or any other kind of relation between people.

Maybe feeling of presence in my body is why I've always sought out extreme experiences; it forces me to be in a moment, to face the fact of my existing in that particular moment, in my body.

You don't have to write like David Foster Wallace or James Baldwin or Maggie Nelson - indeed, you shouldn't. Those writers are doing it better than you ever could.

Abandonment by a lover won't kill us. But it awakens the parts of us that remember when it could.