But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.

I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.

Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison.

It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.

What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make; I can only undo, unmake.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.