In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

I find poignancy in the moments when a person realizes that she has made mistakes. I am not as interested in the mistakes themselves as I am with the consequences and how the person responds to her realization.

Yes, I did try acting when I was in high school and I was terrible at it. So I definitely have had the experience of being bad at artistic endeavor.

Most human things are full of conflict and ambivalence, not ease and simplicity. The world has grown increasingly fundamentalist, and the parameters of discussion have become narrowed. People, when they're fearful, are vulnerable to certainty in rhetoric.

Getting an audience requires luck as well as talent. Some artists are private and shy. It costs them too much.

Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.

I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.