Books are like rocks. You hold one in your hand and look at it in various lights to get a sense of it, and then when you get a good angle, you throw it through a window to see what happens.

It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.

You can get into anything if you are determined. I always thought that with music, too.

Our [former] governor [Pat McCrory] was supposed to be a moderate, but he found himself beholden to people who have much more draconian ideas. I think he assumed this stuff flew under the radar.

My family, before the divorce, moved several times, and after that we moved a whole bunch more times, and so I don't have an anchor to a single place. Probably as a result of that, I'm a little more attenuated to when people do feel close identification to place, whether they say it out aloud or not. I think that there's a sort of local patriotism that is deeper than national patriotism.

Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I dont feel everybody can connect to.

I make up stories that take place in real space with real people. If I could convert this into a technique for experimental novels, I might really be onto something.