Portland is a pretty magnificent place to live.

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.

Surrender to your fear so you may triumph over it.

Not limiting your beliefs opens pathways to infinite potential.

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

I think politics is everything.

I can only speak from my own personal experience, being behind the camera and in front of it, but every magazine cover you see is completely airbrushed.

People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this; that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.

The really great thing about having two TV shows going on at the same time is that I can go to one and say that I have to go and visit the other and then I can just go home and they don't know.

Most Beethoven symphonies require 80 or more instruments, and the late romantics even more.

Around '75 when the recession hit, club owners started going to disco because it was cheaper for them to just buy a sound system than it was to hire a band.

I don't think it's a very Christian thing to come in by the back door rather than the front door.