Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.

The act of language or the act of denying language carries its own heaviness.

Giving the reader the space to move around and be active, and encourage their active response is important to me. That will connect the reader more to the text.

There's relief in white space for the reader.

Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head.

I have what I came to find in my research is a mild form of synesthesia, though I never would have labeled it as such. It's how I think about numbers and letters. They all have inherent genders.

For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.

If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.

I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.

I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.

Every mistake is a new learning adventure.

Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain...

Life’s value is lost when the pursuit of money becomes the goal as opposed to the pursuit of true happiness.

Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world.

Music saved my life. The voice you hear, the soul, the pain, is that of a person who deeply, deeply, deeply appreciates the opportunity they've been given.

In your eyes, I see what's on my mind.

At first I thought I should be a second Beethoven; presently I found that to be another Schubert would be good; then gradually, satisfied with less and less, I resigned to be a Humperdinck.

Commercial real estate always trails residential, and as residential growth flourishes, shopping centers flourish and service the communities, and jobs come out.

Books and teachers are always "right", and we learn only from them, not from any other resource in the room, such as our friends.

And, yes, words matter. They may reflect reality, but they also have the power to change reality - the power to uplift and to abase.