The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

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.

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.

I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.

For a fight to be productive, or at least relevant, writers should fight over different demands they put upon writing (as an individual, private act) and literature (a network of relations in which we are all involved).

In the olden days, a memoir was something written by Churchill and people like that, because they had a grand experience and considered it useful for future generations. And then it became what it became - a public purging in which other people have the chance to judge you and then forgive you, perhaps learning something from your sorry example.

I think about the story while I think about other things. This is an important part of the process: I look at it sideways. If I look straight at it, it produces nothing other than what seem like complicated, brilliant designs that fall apart the following morning. In some way stories mature when you're not looking.