When I'm working, I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down.

Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.

If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised

Having kids is very difficult to do on your own, and it's really crazy difficult to think you're doing it as a team and to find out that you're not actually part of a team.