We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.

Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.

I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.

I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.

I had never written about what it's like to live the life of a writer, and I had never read a book that combined talking about the life of writing and how you can do it, how you can stand it, how you can emotionally manage it, with the choices that we all make on the page.

I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.

I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.