One of the ways that we cope with anxiety is by over planning and over controlling. If we know where it's going to, we can just relax and do it. Unfortunately, in my experience, that's not the way it works. The story doesn't want to be told what to do. You have to enter into this process with a high level of trust that the many hours of choosing that you're doing every day will gradually clarify the narrative for you. And that's what happens.

I think something that I can't name about our media has made us move away from that kind of specificity and that kind of curiosity.

I'm a big lover of America. I love the people, but also the weird berms, the strange little high schools tucked away in different places, and just the whole geography and the psycho­logical apparatus of Americans.

Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.

America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice.

The bottom line for me is that life is short and art is long.

Toni Morrison seems to have a lot of faith in people - that's what I mean by gentle power.