My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.