There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years?

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.

For me, the process of writing a novel happens mostly in your head before you actually start writing.

There's a lot of effort expended once you begin to completely trash your life. Sometimes, writing feels like this to me.

Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.

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.

A lot of people work really diligently to maintain a "profile" in the writing world, but that's so hard, and so boring most of the time. So you just keep doing what you like to do, I guess, and try to enjoy it.