If I'm writing a story and you're reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process.

I often think about image, and image is something that - but in truth, the real artistic process, as I've understood it, is 95 percent intuitive, like seat-of-the-pants, at-the-moment decisions that you can't even explain, you know?

I'm always nice when I do drugs. But, you know, I'm nicer on the drug called "writing."

I always describe writing a story as throwing bowling pins in the air and then catching them.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

It seems to me that there are certain thoughts and vignettes and attitudes that I have always had the desire to represent.

It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.