The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.

If you at least try to do the things that excite you, it will make you a more expansive and present person - you’ll feel, at the end of your life, that at least you took the shot.

It seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that's durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment.

I feel nervous because I revere [Zadie Smith] so much. I don't want to be stupid. If I say something stupid, just interrupt me.

All storytelling is kind of that - there's a bit of text that you put pressure on that spits out some desire that a character has and then you follow that. The other part is that every scene raises an expectation in the reader's mind - that's part of its job is to make you look in and be curious.

That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

Whether you're eighteen or sixty, in a certain way, whatever you know is valid.