There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.

The mind is complicated and you can't trace the roots of its processes, but there is something about mathematical and algorithmic patterns that I like to recognize in things.

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.

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.