Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

My hole is warm and full of light.

I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.

That ... is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang.