My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.

No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.

'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.

You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. A reality shaped around your own desires - there is something sociopathic in that ambition.

I was brought up with the sense that I was absolutely no different from my brothers. I went to college thinking I was absolutely no different from the men in college. But that's not true. I'm fundamentally different. The problem was not being able to understand difference and equality at the same time. It's something that we can't seem to comprehend. You can't state difference and also state equality. We have to state sameness to understand equality. It's a mistake.

Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?