But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.

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.

May the Lord grant you tender kind heart.

The older you get, the faster time passes in your mind, so use your time according to what is most important.

Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

I have a little dictaphone and if a sound takes my fancy or if a lyric comes to me in the middle of the night I'll just record it there and then.

I'm terrified of learning lines, and I've always been terrified that I won't learn them.

I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.

Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense.

We have to recognize that there is a Palestinian entity, that the PLO and the Palestinian Authority has to run their life.