It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.

Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.

We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do that.

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.

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.

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

I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation.