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.

Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't know what people are going to think about yet.

The development of the plot of the novel leads to a single point, and it's my opinion that the ending that the novel has, which is a somewhat ambiguous ending, is the only logical ending given the structure of the book as a whole.

[Michael] Chabon, who is himself a brash and playful and ebullient genre-bender, writes about how our idea of what constitutes literary fiction is a very narrow idea that, world-historically, evolved over the last sixty or seventy years or so - that until the rise of that kind of third-person-limited, middle-aged-white-guy-experiencing-enlightenment story as in some way the epitome of literary fiction - before that all kinds of crazy things that we would now define as belonging to genre were part of the literary canon.

I'm not for it [Brookland and The Testament of Yves Gundron ], I'm not against it, I'm just interested in it and how it functions, but I think that, in some senses, in those two novels, that was difficult for people to see.

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.

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