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.

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.

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

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.

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?

I believe there are beautiful things seen by the astronauts. The indications revealed. That few of us realize life is quite surreal

I'd like to introduce a man with a lot of charm talent and wit. Unfortunately he couldn't be here tonight so instead . . .

You know how I always seem to be struggling, even when the situation doesn't call for it?

I never said I had no idea about most of the things you said I said I had no idea about.

I was taken in by the bravado and the sounds of Mexico... not so much the music, but the spirit.

Any work of art dignifies life.

In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions.

Real prayer is union with God.

[President Bush should] quit hiding behind the Secret Service, come out and face the nation and explain his failure to protect the country.

The matter of social security and these grants is to help to address the levels of poverty in the country.