I just don't really see the dialectic between inside and outside, and corporate and revolutionary, as being as cut and dry as I used to.

Everything man does creates more harm than good. We have to accept that fact and not delude ourselves into thinking something is sustainable.

There is an awful lot of pious theatre at the moment, where you go to have what you already believed reinforced.

I think they have no duty. But we do have the opportunity, not to change the world, but to make people think differently.

I think revising is the same as writing, at least when it comes to the essential truths I wrote about in “Write Like a Motherfucker.” It’s all work. It’s all part of the process. Writing and revision are not two entirely different things, even though they demand slightly different things of us.

My husband, Brian Lindstrom, is my biggest supporter. There’s no doing it without him. When I was writing Torch, he believed in me more than I believed in myself. He’s always, always, always been there for me, every time I needed him. He encourages me. He believes in me.

So much of what I’ve learned, so much of what’s good in my life, was learned because something bad happened, or from making the wrong decision. Through bad decisions I learned how to find the ways to make the right ones.

My mother would have been proud of my hike. I would love for my own children to have such adventures someday. I hope they do. I hope the word that comes to them when they see a photograph of me in twenty years is go.

I think it would be this thing that I learned when I was writing my first book. It would be surrender to your own mediocrity, which sounds kind of sad, right?

At Sunday school I was given this little book of lyric poems. It wasn’t even a book; more like a booklet. I remember reading the poems inside and not even knowing what this feeling was that I had; it was almost like ecstasy. I felt so pierced by those words.