The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

You small mortals don't realize the power of your stories.

I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn's rings.

Sin leads to physical death in the spirit.

All these jokes have been pre-approved as funny by me.

One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.

Look at an infantryman's eyes and you can tell how much war he has seen.

Once in a while, you will see someone really drippy. The person has to stare at the teacher all the time with that devoted and disgusting and sick look. It's boring, misplaced devotionalism.

We bury the men who do the nation's creative work under layers of administrators and mountains of memoranda. We shrivel creativity by endless frustrations.

A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference.

I always joke that I'm a British actress trying to break into Scandinavian TV.

Have you ever had one of those days when something just seems to be trying to tell you somebody?

So good to be alive when the eulogies are read.