With students, one is often in the position where you have to be authoritative about what they're doing and connected to some principle. I prefer not really knowing the answer to anything interesting and I try to encourage that in teaching. If I start to feel certain about something my curiosity goes away, my mind shuts down. I'm sure that's not always true, it's stupid to generalise.

I work, and then I leave the office, and I'm with my kids and just sort of enjoy them on a visceral level, and I don't feel like I'm exorcising my own deep ideas about parenthood and about how my life will come into play in my work.

Slamming the book shut produces a wind on the face, a weather that is copyrighted by the author, and this wind may not be deployed without permission, nor may the pages be turned without express written permission.

Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.

A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.