I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.

However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing position for the duration of the story.

Listen to me. I’m shy. I’m not stupid. I can’t meet people’s eyes. I don’t know if you understand what that’s like. There’s a whole world going on around me, I’m aware of that. It’s not because I don’t want to look at you, Lucinda. It’s that I don’t want to be seen.

Someday I would change my name to Shut Up and save everybody a lot of time.

I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.

I'm a firm believer that there are no rules in art. Every trajectory is different.

I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.