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.

People were always hungry, bullied, afraid, paranoid - so I just thought I'd show that in the novel in a kind of suffocating way.

With kids, they force you to get out of bed. They force you to smile. They remind you of spontaneity.

The first hit on the nervous system is the one I'm most interested in, because I think if you hit the reader emotionally, the reader can't guarantee the lessons they would like to learn.

I'm interested in someone who's mired in grief: how do you get back to that thing that makes them warm? Because you know that's in there.

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.

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.