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.

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

I've always been a horror movie fan, since I was a kid. And I was also a really scared kid. I was easily scared of the dark. One of the ways I would try and get away from my fear of the dark was to pretend like the monsters were my friends.

There are all kinds of strange threads in American culture, and places where sympathy is extended and places where it isn't, and places where outrage is extended and places where it's not. It's this constantly shifting barrel of eels.

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.

At a certain point, you must be able to slip loose. At a certain point, you found that you had been set free. You could be anyone, he thought. You could be anyone.

Identity issues are hardwired into the way I think about character - it's almost as if I can't get away from them even if I want to.