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

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.

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

I always, at least back then, struggled with emotion in writing. I felt like I could do odd, unusual things, but there wouldn't be enough feeling in them, and maybe if there's a progression at all to anything that I've done it's that I've always wanted to have a high - an almost overwhelming - degree of feeling in what I write.

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

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.

It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.