I don't feel sentimental about the past, but I can't help noticing how hard it has become to keep a grip on anything. Maybe it's the totalizing impact of corporate culture, maybe it's the atomizing impact of technology.

The idea that you can live off the grid and just do your own thing is a very American idea - that you should be able to do your own thing, if you want to, if you're willing to pay the price for it. I think the price has gotten higher and higher.

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.

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

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.

Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.

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