The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.

The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

I'm not dead. But when I am, it's likeI don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.

A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.

What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.