Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn't seem that bad.

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

My skin was the border between the world and me.

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.

When I was in high school, I was in a special math class. I was infatuated with physics, particularly nuclear physics, Einstein, and the Big Bang. I read a lot about black holes. And partly because I'm so lazy I thought you could do all this just by looking at the sky and thinking up universes. It didn't seem like hard work when I was a kid, so I enrolled in this class.

There has to be a kind of grassroots push, a movement, as it were, against the inherent isolationism of American capitalism as practiced in the publishing industry. There need to be grants and government support and a few publishers, mainstream and independent, who are not afraid to challenge American readership. We need to build a network of translators, publishers and readers. We hope that our annual anthology might provide an upsurge in interest for European fiction and then, as we publish it every year, become a habit to many readers.

I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability — the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.