The worst thing you can try to do is to steer the story once it gets going. You just kind of follow along and see where it goes. That's the fun.

You can't be careful on a skateboard.

The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies.

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

The soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can and tends it.

It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.

Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn't the gods made them with the most vurnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted.