I usually have more than one thing I'm working on at once - I've been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth.

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.

The happiest I have ever been is in the life that I led with my wife and kids.

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 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.

I still think about the writers I loved when I was a kid.

My main reader was my wife Sheila, and I haven't written a lot since she died.