My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach.

If I waited to be in the mood to write, I'd barely have a chapbook of material to my name. Who would ever be in the mood to write? Do marathon runners get in the mood to run? Do teachers wake up with the urge to lecture? I don't know, but I doubt it. My guess is that it's the very act that is generative. The doing of the thing that makes possible the desire for it.

Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.

When I lived in the city, I had learned to close my door against a lot of the noise, but when I open my door here, I'm not opening into the possibility that I'm going to run into somebody or be faced with a hundred choices about what I'm going to do, or which cafe I'm going to go to, or which way to distract myself.

I think so much about how we read, about the nature of solitude, and of community, is changing in ways that none of us yet understand.

Success is so fleeting, even if you get a good book deal or your book is a huge success, there's always the fear: What about the next one?

As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point?