Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read.

I was trying to make a novel about something no one wanted to read about into something they couldn't put down or look away from.

I've been told it's hard to write about singing. I didn't realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew!

I knew it was a risk but what I was after was a novel that is about the feeling that comes with a coincidence in real life - that you feel as if something divine has intervened and has arrived with a message.

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.

The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses...It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart.

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.