I want what I write to be deeply engaging and strange and true.

Even if we try to see people in our lives accurately, it is distorted by our own wants and prejudices and experiences.

People think it's suspect and self-indulgent to make art, and I don't think that's true. Some people think you should be busy making something that you can sell in the marketplace, and if nobody wants to buy it, it must be crap. And that's not true.

It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.

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 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.

The writer has to take risks and go somewhere full of mystery and possibility for the novel to deepen over the years it takes to write it.