If you’re ever lucky enough to belong somewhere, if a place takes you in and you take it into yourself, you don't desert it just because it can kill you. There are things more valuable than life.

New Orleans cuisine is Creole rather than Cajun.

In the Netherlands I read the first chapter of Exquisite Corpse to an audience that laughed in all the places I thought were funny - an experience I've never had in America!

The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets.

You hold onto what you have; you do not give it up easily, even when you know it is poisoning you.

You can only maintain an immensely gothic attitude for so long before either killing yourself or beginning to feel like a poser.

Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.

I can't heal your pain but I can see it. And you don't have to be lost. Not forever.

Young writers shouldn't be afraid of striving to emulate their favorites. It's a good way to learn, as long as you move on from it and don't publish too many of the results.

Never relinquish your terrors. That's when they catch you.

Ive tried to avoid labels, but they always find you.

The reason can make as much damage as passion.

Environmental disaster is the gravest threat to China's continued development. That's according to me, but it is not some wacko view.

The American people never carry an umbrella. They prepare to walk in eternal sunshine.

You have to be a lover of books without expecting more of them than they give - a little pleasure, a little insight, a moment of escape, a deepening of your own humanity. Not much else.

I guess I'm just fiercely independent.

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. She who loves roses must be patient and not cry out when she is pierced by thorns.

Negotiations are about controlling things, about being in the driver's seat and make one tiny mistake; you're dead. I made one tiny mistake, I wore women's clothes

A woman in a single state may be happy and may be miserable; but most happy, most miserable, these are epithets belonging to a wife.

The stories are what no one wants to talk about. So you make up a story because no one is going to tell you the truth.

The western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.