I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion.

Monologue is the most honest way to represent human beings.

When you do something that's going to speak to people, it's going to be because you're really allowing all of yourself to the table in an accepting way.

If you start with the idea that you are going to be writing about a night in a graveyard, and that there are only a few living people in that frame, all sorts of interesting and difficult technical problems arise. And then form - new form, or experimental form - might be understood as just trying to tell that story most movingly and efficiently.

You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.

In the reason that the contrast between the absolute and the relative is so terrible is because we believe so fully in ourselves as permanent, continuous, and central. I feel insane saying this, but if one weren't so deluded about the permanent reality of the self, a lot of this pain would actually lessen.

Writing and reading and speaking with specificity and skill has never seen more important to me than it does at this moment. It's what's between us and chaos.