Anything you read can influence your work, so I try to read good stuff.

Dally was so real he scared me.

I guess I just couldn't see standing there -- alive, talking, thinking, breathing, being -- one second, and dead the next. It really bothered me. Death by violence isn't the same as dying any other way, accident or disease or old age. It just ain't the same.

I advise writing to oneself. If you don't want to read it, nobody else is going to read it.

All of a sudden it felt like people were peering over my shoulder, wondering what I would write next. I was blocked for four years.

I like having a private name and a public name. It helps keep things straight.

It seemed funny that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps was the same one. Maybe the two worlds we lived in weren’t so different. We saw the same sunset.