[I remember going] to a hotel gym at six o'clock in the morning, and the television was on, and it's some drama in which two men have clearly kidnapped a woman. They're interrogating her, and they put a plastic bag over her head. They're suffocating her, and I'm thinking, It's six o'clock in the morning! Why does anybody need to see this? How can I find the off switch?

I don't want to stand with somebody's praise.

I craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.

I saw that my best work was my most personal work, which is odd, because my fiction is very far afield and has nothing to do with my life.

Fiction is always really a labor.

But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information. He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn.

You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.