I am surprisingly optimistic, though lately that's been hard to maintain. Art and slow, small, close gestures help remind me of my optimism.

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.

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?

He who controls the spice controls the universe.

Let me be kind and loving today because tomorrow is far far away.

I told him, though, that he better be good to you. When you came along, I said I'd share you, but I told him to remember that you're my sister. I loved you first.

Music is more than just listening to it. People use the music for them protection at times.

I want freedom and I realize that the only way to get it is to quit breaking the law.

We got 16,000 wonderful vehicles. We got all the steel that we make our tanks out of. Of course, we couldn't have done without Western aid.

A lot of artists don't like the sound of their voice. They're put off by it.

Life is too short to spend forty to fifty hours around people who do nothing but stress you out and make you desire to go stick your head in a blender.

To be more involved and more aware is appealing to me.

Friendship must never be buried under the weight of misunderstanding.