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

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

It was strange the way he loved her; a side long and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention.

I tended to write the book in these bursts of two or three months at a time. So I would know, or at least feel securely, that for the next few months I was at least going to have a few hours a day.

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.

To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.

I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It's all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer.