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

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.

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.

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.

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?

It’s too dangerous…I would never be able to forgive myself if something happened to him. I wouldn’t be able to bare it. Forgiveness would be out of the question

I have always been driven. I have always believed in what I believe very deeply.

I am an unwilling devil. I cry like some vagrant child. I want to go home.

The perfect moment, once lost, is not easily found again.

Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.

You are a ghost, Andi," she says. "Almost gone." I look at her. I want to say something but I can't get the words out. She squeezes my hands. "Come back to us," she says. And she's gone.

Everyone deserves to believe they are beautiful.

Things musicals taught me: All your problems will go away if you sing about it.

When one person makes an accusation, check to be sure he himself is not the guilty one. Sometimes it is those whose case is weak who make the most clamour.

I'm in an odd position because I write across so many genres for so many people and they all influence me, and if I'm going to write as honest an album as possible, it's going to be layered.