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.

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.

It wasn't for children, seventh grade. You could read the stress of even entering the building in the postures of the teachers, the security guards. Nobody could relax in such a racial and hormonal disaster area.

A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording.

Music still sort of hangs up there in the sky for me as this thing that moves me so much, but I can't really make it. It's like a car I can't drive.