A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.
Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.
Tin House magazine is a port in the storm for people who love language. It is unfailingly excellent, and committed to publishing new voices in addition to delivering freaky-fresh work from established writers.
I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.
America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,. . . and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.
I'm probably a lot closer than perhaps the contents of my early fiction suggest to a jaded Denny's waitress with smoker's-lung-black humor than a ghost hunter.
At the end of the block where I used to live in Coconut Grove in Miami, there's a swampy area, a no-name alcove with a little mangrove estuary. It's beautiful.
Now that I think about it, it seems to me that’s what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua.
. . . love is the sum of our choices, the strength of our commitments, the ties that bind us together.
What's important to me is to share, and being inspired, and inspiring.
Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution without physical symptoms, in my chest and my stomach, of discomfort or anxiety. And yet I have never left school.