I like to sleep about four or five really solid hours at night, and then sometimes take a nap in the afternoon or early evening after dinner. I love naps.

Maybe it's because I grew up during the MTV generation, but to me a perfect song is one I can imagine a music video to, a song that can take you into a dream.

Here is the door of my mom's house, well-remembered childhood portal. Here is the yard, and a set of wires that runs from the house to a wooden pole, and some fat birds sitting together on the wires, five of them lined up like beads on an abacus.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

You can recognize in your own reading habits what writers are doing that works and what doesn't. I'm becoming much more aware of that after reading a decade of student stories.

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about in the grocery store tabloids my mom bought, situations that struck me as compelling, anecdotes I'd heard, images, words, metaphors.