I became a writer because I am the youngest of six children. I listen; I observe. I'm camouflaged as a moth. Mothers are unseen. It helps me write.

I would like to give you more of my heart,but there is nothing more I can give you. I gave you everything and you crushed it into bits.

I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.

I am a toggler. I always have three or four projects going, short stories alongside novels and essays. When one project is terrible, there's somewhere else hopeful to look.

The Dark Dark is a far slower project, clearly, and that's a relief. I look for slowness anywhere I can find it.

My father thought a novel was a broken short story. There's something to that. Many of my favorite novels are novellas. The authors of brief things must reckon with the precision of language.

In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.

I am surprisingly optimistic, though lately that's been hard to maintain. Art and slow, small, close gestures help remind me of my optimism.

The lion's share of my work is revision, 85%? I revise forever, combing over lines, listening and listening to them in different hours and moods so that I feel they are finally right for me.

There's a voice when I write. I speak everything aloud. My family is so accustomed to me talking to myself that often times they don't answer me when I am trying to speak to one of them.

Why do the living assume the dead know better than we do?Like they gained some knowledge by dying, but why wouldn’t they just be the same confused people they were before they died?

Do not speak about anyone who is not physically present.

Love affairs are for emotional sprinters the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.

Collect moments rather than things. Moments get away.

Telling my story is to empower people to believe in their own power. We have so much power individually.

Listen, you may not like the fact that I'm talking about Donald Trump, but the facts are that he is now, this is a race. This is a - it's no longer Hillary's [Clinton]. This is now a horse race.

I love this mansion, though it is too many windows ...to open halfway each morning ...to close halfway each night.

Humanity always becomes a conqueror.

This is about saving children's lives. It is not about agencies and services protecting themselves.

Politics and music don't necessarily go hand in hand. They just do for me.

So it is that good warriors take their stance on ground where they cannot lose, and do not overlook conditions that make an opponent prone to defeat.