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...

Purely the idea of writing a lot of books doesn't make you a great writer, but it might be that the process of doing a lot of writing will make you a much better writer.

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.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day... You don't go to a well once but daily. You don't skip a child's breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning.

I think of writers as explorers, not necessarily as detectives. So there is certainly detecting that is going on - they're explorers.

I understood about fear. And I knew better than anyone in that room what Mouse was capable of. But still I had been raised in a place where to show your fear was worse than cowardice. It was suicide, a sin.