I don't believe in inspiration. I write when I can't avoid writing anymore.

It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

You can see the diversity that pieces in the anthology represent, and then the interconnections-obvious and less obvious-between various stories or between various modes of storytelling. Diversity generates need for conversation, conversation generates common interests, as well as differences. Literature, as a human project, is all about that.