With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.

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.

Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible.

As writer pay declined and teacher pay also, we all started hanging out online. You could say online social networks cheapen our friendships or you could say we were cheapened by a plutocratic power grab and this is all we can afford.

The ideal editor will hold you to the best of yourself in the piece.

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.

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.