Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there's nothing to be done about them.

Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.

Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I've written and throwing it away.

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.

I'm an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard's books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work - the pursuit of darkness, the negative - and I think in some sense I've internalised that as what one is supposed to do.

I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.

Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.