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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Though under earth, and throneless now I beYet while I lived all earth was under me.

Hanging with people who make you feel unappreciated, for the mere sake of appearing to be popular, is the loneliest place to be.

God waits for our permission and doesn’t invade our privacy as we do with others.Everybody has free choice.

If one did not have at least a little luck, one would never survive childhood. But luck can be spent, like money; and lost, like a memory; and wasted, like a life.

I do limit my exposure to the public. You only have so much time.

Anger destroys your soul.

Everybody got their something.

One of the most important things is just to be kind to other people. That is absolutely really important to us, and important to me. That's something that you need to help your kids with, for sure.

Well certainly not having any choice - having your entire life dictated by others.

I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism.