Whenever I get lost in a novel I just throw a poem in. What it does is flare up, and it's so illuminated that I'm able to see where to go. I write between these illuminations.

To be one woman, truly, wholly, is to be all women. Tend one garden and you will birth worlds.

If you can be anything else but a writer, be it.

Like I'm dragging bundles of old clothes? I'm carrying artifacts that breathe fire. I'm talking about a language of smoke. These are three-dimensional creatures that can mate. I'd no more leave them go by the side of the trail than I would my child. I'll carry them until someone amputates my arms.

Women are defined by their biography, and men are sacrosanct from their biography.

I write a lot by sound. One sound leads me to another. These sounds aren't random they have their own logic.

The Peruvian flute music is . . . cool. In this music, they have not yet invented the industrial revolution that leads to excessive punctuality or the failed experiment they call the nuclear family. This is the music of elements, untarnished, unrehearsed.

All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.

Just being in a room with myself is almost more stimulation than I can bear.

As a citizen of the post-historical variety, I am in continual mourning and prepared for worse.