I'm confused, and brilliant books help me to be less so.

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the troubles of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another.

A beginning idea for a book might be: a boy emerges from a hole in the ground. He enters a house. The book will take place in the first ten minutes following his arrival.

Sunday was always the best of days for being the self you had intended to be, but were not, for one reason or another.

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

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.