Humor is really important to me. All my favorite writers are writers I consider to be funny, including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, even though that's not necessarily their rap.

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 didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

I think time just goes faster and faster. I'm saying this a few months away from my fortieth birthday. I don't know when and if one's identity ever does catch up with one's actual age. Personally I feel like I just got the hang of thirty-five.

There is salvation - happiness and virtue - in beauty. I would define beauty in this context as a kind of richness, complexity, mystery, diversity, otherness, and unexpectedness - something that comes from the outside.

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.

Now that I'm almost forty, I look back at some of the decisions I made when I was younger - decisions that I thought of as courageous, or generous, or otherwise befitting a writer; befitting someone who had taken it as their life's goal to understand the human condition - and I wish I could go back in time and be like, "Hey, you don't actually have to do that - you're allowed to look out for yourself a little bit."