The problems that other writers encounter are so fascinating to me as a writer and as a thinker about writing. I have found that many times, my students are experiencing problems that I myself have experienced in my work, but the solution is different because they're different people.

Because I think of novels as collaborative enterprises between the writer and the reader, all of my novels so far have ending with endings that maybe point in more than one direction, and that seems important to me because it seems important to me that after you've invested twenty or thirty hours of your imaginative life into this narrative that you have some stake in how it ends.

Maybe one of the reasons that I don't ever experience myself as having writer's block is I don't feel that I need to be producing every minute of every day.

Nobody thinks that there were never mechanical horses in the world. Everybody knows that there aren't really golems.

There are as many different ways to write a novel as there are varieties of human consciousness, so I am totally delighted if people want to use words that come from genres to describe how this book functions because those words are accurate.

A novel is a way to rethink and rewrite and re-envision the past, and also a way to speak to people who haven't been born yet about what we think about right now.

Time is finite and the demands of the imagination and also the demands of the world are infinite, so sort of brokering some kind of agreement between those things is a continual, and for me, and ever-changing challenge.