Memory narrativises itself.

Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.

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.

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

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

Everyone operates within their own domain and obviously those domains overlap to a great extent.

I like to blow up this notion that all we have to do as writers and artists is represent reality, which is presumably solid and self-evident, with no negotiation of the gap between myself and the world, between this body and this space, which needs narration to close it.