I can't stay engaged for years with a book unless it has feelings. It can't be an idea for me - it has to be a felt thing.

To have a young person speak back, to hand him the microphone for his first-person utterances, you'd have to have an imagined architecture, otherwise people would say you're putting words in their mouths.

When you walk to the end of a fiction, its procedure is 1) intuitive; and 2) emotional. Its intelligence is emotional, I think.

If you die without agency as a child, but you have agency in your body [in the novel], how is it to be enacted unless it is being reimagined by a writer?

If you created a place in air where they're breathing and running around in, and then they speak in that fictional milieu, it's perfectly authenticated because the whole world relies on you, who've made it possible.

I can't stay engaged for years with a book unless it has feelings. It can't be an idea for me - it has to be a felt thing.

Bruce Lee, before he fought, he would try to visualize how the fight would go, because he was visualizing a victorious path out of the combat.