A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.

I don't have a lot of skills, but one thing I can do is, I can compartmentalize. I can make that a little world that I can go back to, so I can be a waitress, or I can be a teacher, and then go and work on my book.

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.

Each character requires different language, and these issues become inseparable. You have all these balls in the air: language, character, narrative. For me, the primary focus must be words, sentences, paragraphs.

The writer has to be brave, I think.

Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways.

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