Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.

I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.

I have no one to blame for the construction for myself, of course, but I'm always surprised and slightly sulky when I realizeВ people are buying the whole thing.

I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

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.

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.