It's fiction's job to express how it feels to be living now, and it's a complex feeling, full of contradiction. To me it often feels like a brutal trivialization of reality.

Toronto is hard to capture in a few strokes.

Paranoia can be a sign of a sanity in some circumstances, in some places and times.

Absurdity isn't quite so absurd as it once was.

I just write what I want to read, and sometimes keeping it interesting means adding one more element that ends up adding another year to the work.

I love poetry, read it a lot, but make no claim to being able to write it.

The idea that language can be recombined to create new forms, new things, is of course very old in poetry.

We're getting used to reality and fantasy passing into each other. Much of the border between them has been erased.

I seem always to have two or three novels going at once. It takes me a long time to finish one.

We want to know that we're not alone with our loneliness or loss.

Science is claiming ever more ground from popular stories of the kind we thought we weren't to believe in.

The man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably

This country awakens so many memories, though each seems like some restless sparrow I know will flee any moment into the breeze.

Fine! You guys can all be beautiful snowflakes! I'm gonna go over here and be an awkward snowflake!

Everybody has their own idea of what's a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino - they're all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb.

The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men.

You are free to make choices. You are not free to escape the consequences.

If you're afraid to fail, then you're probably going to fail.

I am definitely an individual.

I believe that everything happens for a reason.

Experience is a teacher that knows no favorites.