I cut hundreds of pages from my book because I felt myself being reiterative or redundant. Sometimes I wanted to leave just hints of things.

The act of language or the act of denying language carries its own heaviness.

Giving the reader the space to move around and be active, and encourage their active response is important to me. That will connect the reader more to the text.

There's relief in white space for the reader.

Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head.

I have what I came to find in my research is a mild form of synesthesia, though I never would have labeled it as such. It's how I think about numbers and letters. They all have inherent genders.

For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.

If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.

I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.

I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.

Her face a mask of fury and determination.

Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.

Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the anxioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.

He who truly knows has no occasion to shout.

I am not at all cynical, I have merely got experience, which, however, is very much the same thing.

The dead have a way of becoming saints in the eyes of their survivors.

To come to the Oscars for the first time and be seven months pregnant is quite a thing!

My first choice had always been my father. He's still my first pick. Now that the nominating process is over, tonight, I'm happy to announce that I'm going to be supporting Governor Romney.

There's a religious basis to their [Bush and Chaney] kind of conservatism. It's rooted in a kind of fundamentalism. I'm afraid of that. I don't like that idea. I think all extremism is suspect.

Color is a language, like music.