I’m a man performing a role that gets coded as feminine, and I might be assuaging my insecurities about occupying such a marginalized position by spinning elaborate fantasies of masculine intellect and profundity.

The witch stood up and let out a piercing whistle while fervently shaking a gourd rattle, which I first mistook for a maraca. As she spoke, her voice changed, become low and growling and beautifully theatrical.

Today’s trash is the complete Emily Dickinson in hardcover, with dust jacket. Today’s detritus is an unread Penguin Classics 'Don Quixote.' Today’s undesirable is 'Of Human Bondage' in a Modern Library edition.

Once, a very well-known writer said something unkind to me about my book—right to my face!—and I rather wanted to explain that I had plenty of experience with people telling me that my ideas were bad and it didn't matter because that was the job, having bad ideas, and that maybe that was the job of the novelist, too.

There is, inherent to basketball’s play, an indeterminacy that may not lend itself to conventional narrative.

Keeping a journal -- not a blog for an audience, but an actual journal -- feels like a form of aesthetic and personal resistance. It feels a little bit subversive.

Why get an education when revelation is free? Why delay marriage when you’ve already given your whole self away once to God? There was no guidance against these choices. Recklessness was baptized as maturity.