In nature forms are endlessly being destroyed and then recreated and destroyed and recreated. Nature isn't afraid to destroy forms in the process of regenerating. So why are we afraid of that in life?

The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition.

David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I've ever read. [To the End of the Land is] powerful, shattering, and unflinching. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence.

I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.

The rhyme always knows better than you, and leads you to places where you wouldn't otherwise have gotten to and that is absolutely the case. Leading off from formal poetry, there is something about when you pay attention to form and you allow it to have its own laws and you listen to those laws you really do end up in places you wouldn't otherwise go. Which isn't to say that I believe in following the rules when I write. I don't. Each of the forms in my books feels to me new.

Forests, which I think do contain a lot mystery and traditionally are the setting for lawlessness and magic and what is outside of the rational to some degree, are still something more finite. I guess the desert and its crushing sense of infinite space is part of its connection to the mystical - on top of making you dehydrated and therefore primed for visions.

I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.