As a writer I care about America, and care about its carelessness.

I grew up in a working-class community. I come from a big family. I knew Donald Trump would win because I knew he is what poor Americans think a rich person looks like. And I knew that Hillary Clinton would annoy voters in their tens of millions, because she basically sucked at communicating with poor people and seemed like a person who'd been powerful and rich for decades. She was a disastrous candidate. I mean, she was up against a psychopath and she still lost. The country's thinking was beyond her, literally.

The first rule of travel is that you should always go with someone you love, which is why I travel alone.

Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.

As a writer I care about America, and care about its carelessness.