Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything.

A picture book is a small door to the enormous world of the visual arts, and they're often the first art a young person sees.

In a town in Calabria, a long time ago, there lived an old lady everyone called Strega Nona, which meant "Grandma Witch".

I am far more fearful of the USA government than I am of North Korea.

Nobody will ever tell you who praised you but everybody would want to be the first to tell you who criticized you.

Make your world extraordinary! Step out into this world with confidence and treasure yourself.

I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.

I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.

Writing is like pulling your hair out. You have nothing, and you can't think of anything, but you have to think of something.

Desperation is the secret to my steady employment. I am not interested in downtime. I really like to keep working all the time and I always feel like I'm in the mail room of life; working up.

In minority communities there's a sensitivity, often a knee-jerk reaction, to critical representations. There's a misunderstanding of what an artist does.

Some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.