I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.

I have a lot of respect for readers because I'm a reader. That's how I got into writing.

All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had never named him. Had called him "my parrot" all these years. "My parrot." "Love you. "Love you." Did the dogs get him? Or did he get the message - that she said, "My parrot" and he said, "Love you," and she had never said it back or even taken the trouble to name him - and manage somehow to fly away on wings that had not soared for six years.

The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.

My theory is that the world is a difficult place to live in and distraction is the name of the game.