Everyone would tell me they couldn't identify with sexual abuse. No one says they can't identify with the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses because they don't live on Mt. Olympus.

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

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

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.

It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.

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.