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

You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.

I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

I feel like it has gone very fast for me, but I feel like it wasn't instantaneous, at all. I was getting a lot of rejections. I just got very lucky and it happened quickly for me. I don't feel like I'm a prodigy or something.

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.