I would not know what to say to you, except this: there was never a map that got it all right, and truth and beauty were never married to one another for long.

A novel is a tricky thing to map.

I had trouble listening to adults who didn't really mean anything that they said it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head.

I do love the sound of ripping corn husks. The violence of the noise, the sustained popping and shoring of the silky organic threads, made me think of someone tearing up an expensive and potentially Italian set of trousers in a fit of madness that this person just might regret later.

A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.

A text is evolutionary by its very nature.

I was only twelve, but through the slow, inevitable burn of a thousand sunrises and sunsets, a thousand maps traced and retraced, I had already absorbed the valuable precept that everything crumbled into itself eventually, and to cultivate a crankiness about this was just a waste of time.

Part of being a writer is knowing when what you write is really bad.