I think all writing is an attempt to complicate and subvert the dominant narrative. Writing personalizes statistics. It puts a face and a name on a number. I suppose in that sense it's always political.

With an age difference comes a great gap in cultural references, and so on. It's not all about race and gender. It interests me that, as you get older, your younger self becomes a stranger to you. A split occurs within yourself. But maybe we're all always strangers to ourselves.

There is such a shelter in each other.

The whole process of having to put the thing into the world seems so antithetical to the act of writing. Poetry is slightly easier, because there's less money and fewer people involved. You just let a book of poems trickle out in the world, and it finds its own people. Novels are much harder, and you don't think you should have to do some of the things you're made to do.

What passes for love is imperfect knowledge. Not knowing, initially, allows faithlessness to dress up as its opposite; casts the inarticulate as enigmatic, the selfish as forgetful, the angry as impassioned.

Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.

I think all writing is an attempt to complicate and subvert the dominant narrative. Writing personalizes statistics. It puts a face and a name on a number. I suppose in that sense it's always political.