The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.

For me, the process always has to be pretty intense. I could never write just two or three days a week. It had to be every day.

Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.

It is no fun at all to have been writing a book for seven or so years, especially when you've never published anything before.

The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.

I feel like every time I start up, it's like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go.

Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.