When I make fried chicken I always serve masses and masses of fresh mangos. It's a great combination.

When seriously explored, the short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant. Whatever control and technique I may have I owe entirely to my training in this medium.

All literature is gossip.

You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

I despise people who can't control themselves.