Writing has to have a great deal of certainty and self-assurance, but it's not arrogant.

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.

Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.

I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.

Do you fall in love often?" Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.

I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

Violet unwrapped everything old as if it were a ribboned gift given to her by the Gods.

The important thing to remember, ... is that you are a human being and worthy of respect.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

I've spent my life trying to make things simpler. Because I find ultimately that complicated doesn't reach the heart.

Women have so much power that even hearing the word power frightens them.

Measure your emotions. You don't need an atomic explosion for a minor point.

Simply having children does not make mothers.

I came from a family that sometimes didn't have insurance.

Everyone tries to get you to dance at clubs. They come up to you and say "You gotta dance! you gotta dance!" And then I dance, and they're like, "Not like that!"

Although we are free by the law, we are not so in practice.