I'm interested in the hope we invest in science, and the disappointment we can feel when science flattens, or 'explains,' the larger mysteries of religion.

Rain is used as white noise when God is disgusted by too much prayer, when the sky is stuffed to bursting with the noise of what people need.

I don't like real places, but I don't like imagined ones either. I feel like I'm looking for some mixture and it's very hard for me to say because I like to use real place names because there's an uncanny feeling to them, but at the same time I don't ever really try to make them plausible. Sometimes I like to use them as a way to hide in plain sight a little bit, because to me a very exotic or imagined setting has a lot of weight and a lot of burden to it, and it doesn't suit me, but a real place seems to have its own weird legacy, so I don't know what the choice is?

Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

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

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.

RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms - the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.