Because I write intuitively and image-by-image and moment-by-moment, my writing has to be powered by feelings and emotions.

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.

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?

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.

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.

People seem very comfortable having a kind of Cheesecake Factory-type of life.

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.