Sublime

any mention of race affects a story, then, like setting, race must be a part of any craft discussion.

For as long as I could remember, I have struggled to prove myself into existence.

howled out griefs that had come on as sudden and frightening as earthquakes, and even after they emptied out, left him in fear of aftershocks, of unseen cracks in the load-bearing trestles of his mind.

The construction of these two selves felt exhausting, necessary, and oddly familiar. In a way this secrecy, this silence, was merely an extension of my earlier splitting: home/school, Indian/American. Straight/queer: it seemed the only way to keep each aspect of myself safe—an illusion that, though it served me at the time, was bound to collapse. I

The thought was disquieting—that our identities should be so mutable, and therefore the course of our lives.

I heard myself thinking, This man’s message needs a much larger audience.

There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.

These were not really my creations, they did not contain my history; I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. I was an interloper; this was not my heritage. At the same time I had no other heritage which I could possibly hope to use—I had certainly been unfitted for the jungle or the tribe. I would have to appropriate th

The mystical writer uses the myth of his genius to gain power. He (since it is almost always a he) benefits from keeping up the illusions that he has natural talent and that writing cannot be taught.