When I am gripped with despair, when I think I might stop, I speak to my dead. Tell them a story. What am I doing with this life? They hold me accoun… - Alexander Chee

You must be careful. Your voice, the tones it makes, it sounds so strong, as if it could never go away. But it might, all at once, without warning.

Sometimes the writer writes one novel, then another, then another, and the first one he sells is the first one the public sees - but mostly, the debut novel is almost never the first novel the writer wrote. There's a private idea of the writer, known to the writer and whoever rejected him previously, and a public one, visibly only in publication. Each book is something of a mask of the troubles that went into it and so is the writer's visible career.

And I would tell him, as we rise into the air, The curse is not that we cannot choose our Fates. The curse, the curse we all live under, is that we can.