I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.

A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.

The mind is complicated and you can't trace the roots of its processes, but there is something about mathematical and algorithmic patterns that I like to recognize in things.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

I never thought of myself as an outsider. Because outside of what? You would have to give advantage to this space where you're not, to think of it as sovereign because you're not there. I was always in the center of where I needed to be.

I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.

Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she's already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat.