You can't count on notoriety lasting very long, and there's no way to predict whether anyone will care about your books or you in three years, let alone ten or twenty.

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.

Plot was always secondary in my mind.

I read a lot, but at the same time I'm not a particularly good or diligent or discriminating reader. I go through maybe close to a thousand or more books a year, but a lot of times I'll only read bits and pieces of any one individual text.

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 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.

One of the things I rarely do is write about sex.