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

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’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.

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

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.

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.