I always think the novelist should go to the culture's dark places and poke around. Pose a lot of hard questions.

I try to write about how we live today, how we use language, technology, our bodies.

I am always trying to do something new and different. The first step is curiosity, questions. You pay attention to what fascinates you. If you can't shake it, there is something there.

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

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.

You are always working towards the moments in which characters experience reckonings or insight or change. I like to track them past those moments.

I like to mix the real and the imaginary. Sometimes it is characters inspired by real people I know or know of. Sometimes it is a named person from the common cultural dreamscape. And it is tricky, because they have a lot of associated ideas that come with them, and a lot of actual facts.