The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.

Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn't that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying -- valiantly, fruitlessly -- to eradicate.

I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another - desire, by another name - is the source of almost every sorrow.

That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been that way.

To my mind, Guernica is the most important online intellectual and literary journal in America today.

Geniuses have the shortest biographies.

It doesn't ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

I was funny -- ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.

I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world.

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times -- always with the same person.

We cannot save ourselves. It is only Jesus Christ, who can set us free.

Mediocrity triumphs because it presents itself as democratic and because it is dull, and so for many does not seem worth struggling against.

We lay out our lives in a narrative we understand, like a movie, but are you enjoying making it or are you wondering who's watching my movie.

Jesse Jackson has to get back to "I am somebody" instead of "I am some color."

We did want it ["Mary and Jane"] to feel a little different and have some surreal weird touches, which we try to do every episode. That is what we took advantage of.

Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.

The trick is, to treat your days as if each one may be your last.

If in anything I have faith in something you could call the human spirit - I have faith it will always save itself at the last minute.