For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.

If we had no language we'd have nothing.

Shallow believers prefer a shallow God.

In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.

Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that.