When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there,...

It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.

I had officially joined the cacophony of sick mother fuckers.

…but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

Nothing was a more powerful compass of my mood or a better indication of my self-worth than the number on the scale.

[I]t’s the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

The world doesn’t fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.

But I also believe there is enormous value in the piece of writing that goes no further than the one person for whom it was intended, that no combination of written words is more eloquent...

But editors are still the world’s readers. And thus the eyes of the world.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change. The courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference. I still didn’t know the difference.

I hadn’t been able to trust since the age of four. I was torn between wanting to be cradled and telling the world to go fuck itself, and those were opposite sides of the same...