The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear.

Experience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.

Look at me, dancing my little dance for a few moments against the background of eternity.

I don't write toward a genre, and I try not to make claim to a genre after a book is published. That said, The Guardians isn't poetry. It's prose.

The only thing I've consistently been interested in in the last twenty-five years is writing very short texts. That continues to interest me as a project, to contain some part of reality, which is chaotic by definition, in a contained space. I like small apartments. I like getting rid of stuff. I went through my files yesterday and spent hours shredding things. It was great.

I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.

The more you talk about something, the less accurate it gets.