I never could figure out how those people like Bukowski could be both carousers and writers at the same time, because to me writing takes as much destructive energy as it takes to be a really good professional drunk.

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.

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.

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.

I knew I wanted to play around with genre-esque imagery, and the identity theft stuff came in the middle, when I was figuring out how the characters were connected to those images.

It is not like a premonition of death. It is as if she died a long time ago, and she just now remembered it.

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.