As I continue to teach, I have more to offer my students, and as I continue to teach, I have more to learn from my students. I do know some writers who feel very drained when they leave the classroom, and for me this would be a sign that maybe it's time to take a break or refocus because I always leave the classroom even more excited than I was when I walked in.

As a Jewish thinker, I don't think of myself in relationship to the dominant culture's religion.

I think that we're all always just working on finding how that balance functions for us, given today's circumstances.

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.

I tend to think of writing as a more collaborative project than I think some people do.

Trying to talk through and figure out new answers really helps me figure out more about what I'm doing - and what we're all doing.

I do think that the idea of writer's block can be very self-defeating for most writers because it's taking a lot of things that are not only real problems, but that are manageable, solvable problems if you look at them in an individual fashion, and lumping them under the umbrella of something mysterious and vague, which makes it very, very difficult to address what's going on.