It doesn't matter what you do. In the end, you are going to be judged, and all the times that you're not at your most dignified are the ones that will be recalled in all their vivid, heartbreaking detail. And then of course these things will be distorted and exaggerated and replayed over and over, until eventually they turn into the essence of you: your cartoon.

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.

A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.

I never wanted to get to a point in my life where I knew what was going to happen next. I felt like most people just couldn't wait until they found themselves settled down into a routine and they didn't have to think about the next day, or the next year, or the next decade because it was all planned out for them. I can't understand how people can settle for having just one life.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

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.