The issue isn't, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don't matter. Ability doesn't matter. Need is the only thing that matters.

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.

If you directly try to write about an idea, it will never be what you imagined. But if you're imagining through the building of sentences, through the characters, and paying attention to avoid ease and comfort yet still thinking about making the sentences work, you will get a shot at some real interesting stuff.

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.

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.

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.

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