I have a very basic notion of the structure the book might have - that's mostly it. The rest is luck and happenstance.

If he acts, if he doesn't, it's meaningless. The whole thing goes forward. No one is important. No one at all.

I have a different purpose in writing each novel. Some of them seem more similar than others, but the purposes are always different.

A book can just be a description of a stick being snapped in half. If the reader is brought to feel the plight of the stick, well, you can imagine what that would be like.

Americans are genuinely and profoundly anti-intellectual. They are especially so in their pleasure-seeking, which is epically banal.

As far as ideas about book design: I have plenty. But I also try and let people do their jobs.

The books turn out to be about things afterwards. I don't go into them with concepts, for the most part.