“The creative act is DARING. I need that— to be wholly on my knees with fiction.”

“How I could meet my sister? Where could we meet in the writing, or in silence— or in my mind?”

“My whole aesthetic practice is predicated on— if something is too much, you do more of it. This absolutely ruthless pursuit of something consists in refusing to allow the question to intrude, Will anyone go along with me?”

“I was observing somebody doing something beautifully and doing something with all of her heart. It wasn’t lost on me that that was a way of being an artist.”

“The amnesia gave me such a large feeling of wonder and awe, and a love for these stories that I could then write from that point of view. That was the missing element that I didn’t have before.”

“I’m not just fighting against things but I’m fighting for things as well. There’s a vision of a world that I want to grow up into, and art is giving me a glimpse of that.”

“My mother’s death was a metamorphosis for her on the bodily level, but a metamorphosis for everyone she left behind.”

“It’s hard not to write whack-ass shit if you’re afraid of looking at the parts of yourself and the people around you that you don’t want to look at.”

“It’s really almost like an oblique decision, like a decision I make with my peripheral vision, with my left hand.”

“Hopelessness can be the comedown on the other side of a moment of liberation where you thought everything was going to change, and you feel as if not enough did. “

“Even the most skeptical writers talk about process by using language like “the hours just flew by,” or “such and such phrase just came to me.” They’ll mine the language of the supernatural to talk about what’s happening.”

“My poems arrive at these moments and because they arrive at these moments I realize I have to live like the poems. I want to live like the work I’m making.”

“That’s when I realized, “Oh this is the project of the book. I’m remaking my consciousness. This isn’t what I signed up for.” And of course it is— I’m the one holding the clipboard. But this is not what I thought it was going to be.”

“I realized, Oh, I would do anything to get out of sadness. Whether it be turning to rage, or turning to paranoia, or anything else. Any kind of distraction.”

“My first thought was, NO. I thought, I don’t like this idea of “a threshold.” I realized it’s just like because on some level I feel like I’m a very resistant personality.”