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.

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

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.

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.

The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.

I had a naiveté that I would remember the things that I had written already, but I was getting lost in the forest of my own ideas and having to find my way out.

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.