We apply the language that is comforting and comfortable and familiar in order to grasp that which confuses and scares us. That is the first step toward cliché and stereotype, as they're comforting devices. They reduce the confusing world to the already familiar. We're always smoothing out the bumps of actual living to turn it into narratable life.

The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

Memory narrativises itself.

It's difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.

If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.

If you have information you've got the world by the balls. But we have to convert information into knowledge in order to make it humanly useful.