“I know this about myself: I finish things. Most people can’t start things or most people can’t finish things, but if you can start something and finish something, you’re going to be fine. As for status, riches, fame, and splendor? Those are out of reach for everybody.”

“If somebody gives you a really good critique or a really bad critique, all they’re doing is diagnosing something off in the energy of the art. If the critiquer has taste you agree with, maybe you should try to “fix it.” But only you will know the true answer to finish your art, no matter what they prescribe. Every once in a while they happen to say it is a great diagnosis, and miraculously, the medicine to cure the illness too.”

“I write stories where whiteness is not the center. I think that when you are not white in America, you are not at the center. Asians definitely aren’t at the center: they’re not even part of the binary of black and white. If you’re Latinx or Asian or Native American, you’re on the fringes. In my little space, in my pages, I want to be the center. I’ve met Asian Americans who come to my readings and will break down in tears. I tell them, ‘I wrote this for you. I want you to know that I see you because I see myself.’ Maybe it’s crazy that I say this, but I see how much we can suffer when we believe that we deserve to remain in the margins. My education didn’t put me at the center, and I don’t have to accept that this should be true. To say that I am at the center of my narrative is not to say I am more important than anyone else. No. I am saying that I am equal to all who are in the world; I am saying that I am no less a person than anyone else. I am correcting this failure in my Western education in my writings.”

“When I read something I legitimately like, from an author, especially an underground writer, I reach out to them and let them know. It isn’t just like, ‘Here’s a chance to network so I can gain their favor.’ It’s a way to find the most interesting living artists working today and be in communication with them the way I wish I could talk to Tolstoy, because, listen, some underground artists are operating at that level of genius, but the dead are dead and we need to seek out our living geniuses, and at the very least say hello.”

“I’ve been in a long process of trying to understand the difference between loneliness and solitude. Part of that is not being afraid of being alone, and then getting past that fear, and then starting to separate out what is loneliness, and what is solitude, and what is privacy, and what is secret? What is a natural separation of time and schedule, and what is abandonment—or rejection? What is rejection and abandonment, and what is just people taking space to do their own day or whatever? So, no. Now I don’t feel lonely at all. It feels like a big injury that healed.”

“I felt different as a child. I was nearly mute, or expressed myself in timid monosyllables. But then my moment arrived and it seemed to me that I lowered a bucket into my head and pulled out words. The words carried a story with them. The more the story advanced, and the wilder the pace of the bucket as it went up and down, bringing me pleasure and unease, the more enthralled the other children were. But was I really different? No. Just think of when, in ordinary conversation, we proceed in disjointed phrases, either weighing our words or using an ironic tone that drives out a melodramatic one. Then, unexpectedly, suddenly, something breaks through the margins and speech becomes a flood, liberating, moving, passionate, fierce, until we’re embarrassed, we’re sorry, we say: I don’t know, something got into me. Well, that something – an ‘I’ crouching in our brain – grabs us and tears us away from a prudent or calculating 'I’, dragging us along, imposing its rhythm: it’s a common experience for us all. We know it, whether we’re writers or not.”