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

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

I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.

I started appreciating and valuing different things. Some things just became insufferable to me, and not just literature. I used to like horror movies and now I couldn't stand them.

Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.

There's no bad writing; you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it.