The amazing thing about an artistic collaboration is that it is as intense and intimate as a romantic one. Sometimes even more so.

Making up characters and places and plots, unlike fixing your plumbing or doing dishes, is anything but practical or rational. I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right.

Often, the stories are very much like trust falls. You fall, and you hope the story's going to catch you.

If we're a family and your brother wishes you death, it's not a very happy family.

My stories are very compact. I want them to say the most complex things in the simplest way.

In the army you feel violated - there's no private space. Writing was a life-saver, a way of recovering private territory.

I really believe hatred is not a primal emotion, in that you can't find it in nature. It's basically some kind of distortion of fear.