The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

As a writer, I'm too busy and worried to experience the delight while composing my own work, although, of course, I hope a reader will find something of it when the work is complete. But I do try to figure out where in their experiences certain characters of mine, who are not necessarily readers, and certainly not writers or artists, find an equivalent sensation: of delight, of astonishment, of whatever it is that briefly - and brevity seems essential - reassures us, connects us, sends a shiver of inarticulate recognition down our spines: Oh, yes: life.

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.

I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.

A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility.