I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.

I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way.

Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.

The past was so past it hurt.

I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.

I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.

I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

I judged about a zillion awards this year so Ive been reading a lot of books that just came out.

It's also true, however, that having conquered the regional writer ghetto, I am now intent on conquering the nationalist writer ghetto and moving out into the world more.

I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.

I am nothing more than the consequence of catastrophe.

Empty your life from the baggage of the past so you may enjoy the beauty of the present.

Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.

It weren’t too loo long before I seen something in me, had changed. A bitter seed was planted inside of me. And I just didn’t feel so, accepting, anymore.

A man can never have too many friends.

Why are we working so hard to preserve Iraq, a fake country to begin with? Why do we care whether this fake country that was drawn on the map 100 years ago remains?

If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.

Every now and again it would be considered wholesome for me to be more with people of my own age. Demotion to such company was a sapless exile. Their inanity was insufferable.

I have not been sent to curse people, but as a mercy to all mankind.

Curses, like chickens, come home to roost.