“Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song.”

“Forgiveness, which is the place that every story turns, the chance we give each other.”

“Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.”

“You obsess (but of course you obsess) until the joy is gone from that thing you'd loved, until your fury overwhelms your passion, until you no longer know how to sit with your back against a tree and write poetry that no one will ever see.”

“Fox-TrotBy the stream the fox and she-fox stoodNose to nose beneath the starsDancing the music of the woods.The deer rapped a beat with their hooves,The ravens sang from raven heartsAs by the stream the fox and she-fox stood.The great owl called as a great owl would,The squirrels all shimmied in the dark,Dancing the music of the woods.Then from the north a fierce wind blewAnd broke the starry dance apartBy the stream where the fox and she-fox stood.”

“I’d have given any- thing to know how Mom and Dad were, but you can’t ask your parents such questions. You have to wait for them to tell you what it is that will happen next...”

“I hold to fiction as a cure, or partial cure, or cause for hope, or essential distraction from the rain you wake up to, the doubts in your head, the daily desolation that you have not yet said what is most true, you have not yet crafted the story that reveals you. And therefore something waits. Therefore you must wake and you must write and you are not alone.Your fiction is with you.”