Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

I happen to like the strange ones. People who look normal and leads normal lives - they're the ones you have to watch out for.

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't keep reading your work.

Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?

I couldn't tell wether the hole that opened up inside me was from missing you or from the change of season

Writing is fun - at least mostly. I write for four hours every day. After that I go running. As a rule, 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). That's easy to manage.

you mean machines are like humans?" I shook my head. "No, not like humans. With machines the feeling is, well, more finite. It doesn't go any further. With humans it's different. The feeling is always changing. Like if you love somebody, the love is always shifting or wavering. It's always questioning or inflating or disappearing or denying or hurting. And the thing is, you can't do anything about it, you can't control it. With my Subaru, it's not so complicated.