I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation.

Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle."

I know a lot of people in the city, at all levels, horizontally and vertically - and that to me is a privilege, to me as a person but also a writer. I've dined with billionaires, and I play soccer with busboys.

I have been on the margins in terms of having to find a place to live and getting a job, but at some point, and before that point, I always thought no matter where I am, that's the center.

Writing is a mode of agency in the world that is different from mere employment. There has to be some sort of ethical or moral drive, even if you are unaware of it.

I think about the story while I think about other things. This is an important part of the process: I look at it sideways. If I look straight at it, it produces nothing other than what seem like complicated, brilliant designs that fall apart the following morning. In some way stories mature when you're not looking.

Every writer owes something to a particular tradition he/she grew up in. But no serious writer - other than the militantly nationalist ones - would reduce his/her domain of influence to a single tradition. Furthermore, historical breaks are so common and large in Europe that there are ruptures in every tradition which then connect the same generations across national borders. Younger Eastern European writers, for instance, have more in common with other writers of the same age in Europe, than with the previous, communist-era generations in their own countries.