I believe that with enough practice and good faith, you can learn to recognize when the work is achieved.

I read constantly. If I don't have a good book, I'm beside myself.

The characters that I create are parts of myself and I send them on little missions to find out what I don’t know yet.

You're supposed to get tired planting bulbs. But it's an agreeable tiredness.

I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher's desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way. And even with the ones I do finish, I think of all the ways they might have been better.

Some things arrive in their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever.

The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.