I've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I've always followed his work and loved it.

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.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

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

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

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.

I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.