That's how I work, whether with stories or novels - they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I'm walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing.

You can't tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.

A lot of people work really diligently to maintain a "profile" in the writing world, but that's so hard, and so boring most of the time. So you just keep doing what you like to do, I guess, and try to enjoy it.

In some ways all of my fiction is like a conversation I'm having with the writers I read when I was first falling in love with books.

I'm certainly very influenced by what you would call "contemporary headline horror," stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news. And, you know, lastly, probably things that have happened to me in my own life.

In the end, there probably isn't much difference between being in love and acting like you're in love.

Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.