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.

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

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.

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

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

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.