The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.

The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.

I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.

Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won't believe in it and it won't be real to me until there's a finished book I can hold.

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

I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.

I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.