I think humor is a really important way of creating solidarity - like, through humor you can make people realize that certain situations, where they thought they were alone, are actually shared by everyone.

I try really hard to cultivate the pure love of reading, to make time for it, because it would be really sad to still be a writer without remembering why, on some visceral, emotional level.

I've gotten a lot of comfort from the philosophy of the Roman Stoics. For me, one of the most powerful ideas of Stoicism is that you can't pick or choose in the world what you want to happen and what you don't want to happen, and that actually if you did get to choose, the version you would come up with would be unsociable, lame, and basically less beautiful than the truth.

The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.

I think it's true that, as is often observed, the writer is always an outsider. A writer is someone who is telling stories about what's going on, which is something you can't do if you're totally caught up in the moment.

Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.

When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?