We all think we know what happens after death. But maybe it's going to be not only weird but also dorky and comic and inconsistent.

There's not a lot of whimsicality in the form, not a lot of indulgence allowed. Like when I was younger, I would sometimes go, "Oh, every other section will be narrated by a chair." Or, "It will be a double helix shape!" That never really worked.

Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.

Success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it... Err in the direction of kindness.

If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.

An artist's job is to be interested in things as they are.

All I really know in nonfiction is that when I come home, I've got all these notes and I'm trying to figure out what actually happened to me. I usually kind of know what happened, but as you work through the notes, you find that certain scenes write well and some don't even though they should. Those make a constellation of meaning that weirdly ends up telling you what you just went through. It's a slightly different process, but still there's mystery because when you're bearing down on the scenes, sometimes you find out they mean something different than what you thought.