The big change that's happened for me in terms of my own life and how outsidership is reflected in my work is that I used to feel extraordinarily isolated in my life as I was trying to figure out who I was and how to have intimate relationships. And so my central characters also were isolated and usually in quite a bit of pain.

I have a career now, and I have to say, five years ago I didn't. I'm 50, and you never know what works, but I think part of that is because - in this way that can't be defined but which can be examined - we cannot work alone.

I do love the young adult novels as a form and genre, because it has a purity of intention and heart.

I'm someone who can create critiques of individuals based on their economic history. That's one way I look at people in terms of one story that could be told purely in a Marxist construction.

I can be incredibly angry with someone, I can be incredibly critical, but... I went through a period where I was reading a lot of memoirs of guards in holocausts and serial killers. I like to understand why people do bad things.

By 1988, I was living in New York myself.

People, for reasons of kind of security, they tend to move towards people like themselves.