I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

Depression is when you think there's nothing to be done. Fortunately I always think there's something to be done.

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.

I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.