I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow I keep myself sane.

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.

The less you offer, the more readers are forced to bring the world to life with their own visual imaginings. I personally hate an illustration of a character on a jacket of a book. I never want to have someone show me what the character really looks like - or what some artist has decided the character really looks like - because it always looks wrong to me. I realize that I prefer to kind of meet the text halfway and offer a lot of visual collaborations from my own imaginative response to the sentences.

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

Art is about eliminating almost everything in order to focus on the thing that you need to talk about.

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.

I've discovered that like every writer, I'm helpless MYSELF - and that means I find myself unconsciously or semi-consciously repeating motifs and themes and even using certain words or images recurrently in my work, no matter how much I think I'm starting fresh. But I've always admired artists who made a specific sport of trying to visit different kinds of genres or mediums or modes - not just 'western' or 'detective', but comedy/tragedy, epic and miniature, traditional/experimental.