There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

It is fascinating to me that when the lists of the great writers are trotted out year after year, you often find lists without a single woman mentioned.

I think because mothers usually are the people who take care of us when we're little, and when we're little those mothers are omnipotent, perhaps men even more than women don't like to think about that dependency. That dependency is horror.

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

Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.