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.

I think the MFA programs have had a real effect on the state of American fiction, but I don't think it's a question of "this is written by someone with an MFA, and this isn't." I challenge anyone to identify a book in that way. It's totally impossible.

Tall people have a real advantage in the world.

Looking at and shaping your own work is a very intuitive process. You see something you've written in your notebook. It's there on the page and either feels right or it doesn't, and it's hard sometimes to go beyond that and discover why it feels that way.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work.

... people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering.