When I watch students make particular decisions about language, structure, and form, it sharpens my own thinking and my own development as a writer.

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.

Those who win never give up.Those who give up never win.

Falling in love is a subtle process, a connection sparked by attraction, tested by compatibility, and forged by memory.

After sixty years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.

One has to have the courage of one's pessimism.

I wonder why guys mistreat and disrespect girls. But then they expect life to hand them a good woman when they're older and ready to settle down?

A person who's happy will make others happy; a person who has courage and faith will never die in misery

But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things.

Whatever it took to get elected president of the United States, I don't think being a complete and utter moron is one of those predicates.

The moment we set off in search of love, it sets off in search of us. And saves us.

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.