Writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions.

I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

Music still sort of hangs up there in the sky for me as this thing that moves me so much, but I can't really make it. It's like a car I can't drive.

A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording.

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.

I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.