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.

At bottom, I'm a cheerful person.

I usually feel something before I know it.

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

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.

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.

Magical realism as a declaration in the text is usually when someone can't speak and then they must be magically reinvigorated in some way.