I guess I consider myself at times to have intuition.

... nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.

I think that there's some confusion in my own mind about what I believe.

I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will--that is the part that's almost unbearable.

You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.

I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.

Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am.