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

Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments - an inability to accept life as ongoing.

This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come in a form you do not recognize.

The best thing about time passing is the privilege of running out of it, of watching the wave of mortality break over me and everyone I know.

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.

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.