Writing, for me, is always a dance between the critical part of my brain and the subconscious.

Things, very strange things, happen in folktales and there is never much attention given to the whys and wherefores.

But every age deserves its fashion and its forms, and no one can control what survives.

Why did people try to shush trouble away as if it were an unruly child?

I guess I'm drawn to stories of people whose physicality puts them on the outside of things in order to explore the ways in which an identity is formed around these prevailing attitudes.

I never know where I'm headed when I'm working on a book.

We are like flowers always reaching up towards some shred of light. I find this wondrous, nearly magical, certainly brave.

I'm interested in endurance. People persist in the face of the most excruciating hardships.

As we change, the way in which we are perceived in terms of our relevance, our value, our beauty, and sexual potency changes.

We grow, we mature, some of us give birth, we age, we die.

The language of the novel differs from the just-the-facts language of the old tales. It's robust and earthy, sometimes even baroque.

Nothing kills a CEO's credibility faster than legal, regulatory, and/or ethical questions.

If women were in charge, abortion would be a sacrament, an occasion of deep and serious and sacred meaning.

I sucked blood from one of my best friends

Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

All My Children' taught me a great work ethic; you work so hard on a soap opera!

Follow your foot steps.

It is only in the mountains that I can fully appreciate my existence as a man in America, and my own native land

Life ain't a concept. Music is not a concept. My titles are poetic abstractions of something that is with me all the time, not necessarily in music, but in life. Everybody's life.

Each time I spend with Stella McCartney, I like her better. So I was excited to be asked by her.

And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.