Teaching is enormously satisfying because I'm constantly learning more. Just constantly being exposed to new voices and new life experiences and new worldviews and new structural dilemmas and new characters - it's really exciting for me.

Teaching is enormously satisfying because I'm constantly learning more. Just constantly being exposed to new voices and new life experiences and new worldviews and new structural dilemmas and new characters - it's really exciting for me.

It would have been a hard year if I'd spent it berating myself for not working on the book.

I think about the collaboration between writers and readers, but I also think about the collaboration between all the writers in a generation or in a country or across time contributing to this massive project of documenting and reimagining our world.

I feel that there is an alternate ending that leaps off too far into fantasy and there is an alternate ending that leaps off too far into pessimism, but that, in fact, the novel as it has developed should, if it's functioning correctly, have equipped you as the reader to make your own decision about where you want to go with that, about where you're going to fall on that continuum. So, the novel is taking you directly up to the point that you have to choose, and it's letting you do that.

I think that novels are one of the best means that we have to communicate both with the past and with the future.

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