I believe that a writer has to tell what they think is the truth in a human experience. The truth of the human experience cannot escape the political.

... you should wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on its content. By the time you have gone through twenty drafts, the characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from the people you based them on in the beginning. And even if someone, at some time, gets upset with your words - so what? Live your life, sing your song. Anyone who loves you will want you to have that.

The biggest misconception that people have about the literary life is the romance of it. That a writer has this large world available to him or her of people, of ideas, of experiences, of interchange of ideas...

I write every day and I just love doing it. It's just... it's just a wonderful thing. Some of my stories work, some of them don't work. Some of them are wild and I love them, but they certainly don't fit into any kind of a normal system that I know about.

I'm almost completely without family and it's a very odd feeling in life. I have no children.

The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.

People don't understand how hard it is to get recognized, how hard it is to get people to read your books. How hard it is to get people to even to understand what they're reading when they're talking to you about their books.