Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read.

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

Everyone would tell me they couldn't identify with sexual abuse. No one says they can't identify with the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses because they don't live on Mt. Olympus.

Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.

PhD, MFA, self-taught - the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.

I had a naiveté that I would remember the things that I had written already, but I was getting lost in the forest of my own ideas and having to find my way out.

The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.

As I get ready to buy a new computer, I'm stunned at all the many micro drafts, of different chapters and scenes and whatnot, that litter the hard drive.

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

The ‘knowledge’ (gnan) that was resulting into ‘the things to be known’ (gneya)

Do not make children cross-eyed, by having hair hang about their foreheads, where they see it continually.

It's so hard to think in winter. The world seems confined in the space of your heart

His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.

A reminder (Japan's earthquake and tsunami) how flimsy our sophisticated modern world really is

Animals are unpredictable things, and so our life is unpredictable. It's a long tale of little triumphs and disasters and you've got to really like it to stick it.

I haven't backed down from a fight in my life, and I won't start tonight.

Old men feel a slightly reluctant affection for one another.

The higher my GPA gets the more I realize high school is useless

Let them hate me provided they fear me