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

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

Life is one heck of an invention. It is better than the iPhone 4S and Coke Zero combined.

It's funny, but I think my stories - the good ones - they're much smarter than I am.

I used to feel that if I say something's wrong, I have to say how it could be made right. But what I learned from Kurt Vonnegut was that I could write stories that say I may not have a solution, but this is wrong - that's good enough.

His whole body was completely still, except the wings, which were still fluttering a little, like when someone dies. That's when he finally understood that of all the things the angel had told him, nothing was true. That he wasn't even an angel, just a liar with wings.

Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.