Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge.

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied

And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set.

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'

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