When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.

Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth.

Being with him was like being alone underwater - everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced.

It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.

It's lonely to listen to the pleasure of others, not that I've made a habit of that kind of eavesdropping. There's joy and passion in the next room, in the next bed, but it's not yours.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there's nothing to be done about them.

I'm attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.

Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.

A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.

Designing for children carries a social responsibility beyond bright colors and scaled-down furnishings that only perceptive and informed grown-ups can understand.

Dogmatism is inversely proportional to evidence.

Zeal will do more than knowledge.

I've never had plastic surgery, but if they made a new invention for making people taller, I'd be the first to have the surgery.

When everything starts going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born.

Time brought resignation and a melancholy sweeter than common joy.

We'll learn fear might not mean 'stop'; personally, I've come to believe fear usually means 'go.' It always means listen closely.

Legislation is a matter of more or less intelligent improvisation aiming at palliating conditions by means of patchwork policies.

The stage is not only a world apart, it is a myriad of worlds, and in those worlds a man can have anything he fancies, if only he believes in what he sees.