I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience.

It's impossible to overstate how my relationship to music forms a preserve for the esoteric or even spiritual aspect of my relationship to cultural stuff, to human expressivity... it's a safe enclosure.

I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That doesn't interest me. I want everything to be essential.

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

I don't have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I'm doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs.