I would teach from nine to four, sleep an hour, and write from six until midnight, night after night.

If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed.

I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.

The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.