“I think if you spend much time dwelling on influence you can get self-conscious about every line you write. That’s a great way to freeze up.”

Haiti is unique – the first successful slave revolt in history, the first black republic etc., and then when you get into the culture, the voodoo, and that wonderful synchretization of Christian and African belief and symbology, it’s like nothing the world has ever seen.

It’s amazing what happens when you stick yourself in a place and let things take their more or less natural course.

Eruptions of talent continue to happen in Haiti, in spite of everything.

The Kessler Theater is one such gem, an Art Deco beauty … for a slice of real life, there’s always the Kessler.

I really had to decide why I was writing. I had no interest in going back to law; I very briefly – for about six hours – considered going to get my MBA, but in the end, I realized that the only work I really wanted to do was write.

I started publishing stories in small magazines early on, but after seven or eight or nine years you feel like you need a little more than that to show for your efforts.

I thought when I started writing that I’d have a book out in four or five years, and as it became apparent that that wasn’t going to happen, I became increasingly frustrated and unsure of myself.

I realized I was never going to have any peace with myself unless I made an honest stab at trying to write.

Maybe the light’s at the other end of the tunnel.

I took two fiction-writing courses in college and majored in literature. I felt that I had a knack though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a talent. But it scared me. I felt it was a childish thing wanting to write and that I would forget about it eventually.

I have a horror of being self-indulgent and wasting time, and there is that risk in doing this kind of work. Are you totally deluded in sitting down at a desk every day and trying to write something? Is it self-indulgent, or might it possibly lead to something worthwhile?

I never listen to music when I’m writing.

By the end of the first decade of writing, I considered myself a confirmed failure in the eyes of the world.

The funny thing is, about the time I let go of any aspiration toward worldly success, that’s about the time I started writing decent work.

There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.

If a person wants to be of any use to himself, he better insist on getting his fair share of beauty and pleasure, and if there’s something about the system that’s keeping him from getting his share, then I think he’s well within his rights to fight to change that.

The grand obstacle to the salvation of the scribes and Pharisees was their pride, vanity and self-love. They lived on each other’s praise. If they had acknowledged Christ as the only good teacher

If one is writing in a way that is questioning, or even raising questions about how we are supposed to negotiate the world – even if it is about the self, or love, or how human beings relate

I’d rather be a straight ‘self-proclaimed homosexual’ than a racist, ignorant, hate-filled bigot in Rise Up Australia any day.

Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,

All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.

The art of decoration requires the most sophisticated and self-indulgent skills. Its aim has always been to sate the senses as gloriously as possible… ornament is not only a source of sensuous pleasure

I’ve always believed in self, I’ve always believed that as long as I believe, nothing else matters. I just put that type of motivation and that type of energy into my music, and I’ve always had confidence in my music as well.

The idea of dependence is an explanation, whereas self-sufficiency is an unprecedented, nonanalogous concept in terms of what we know about life within nature.