I listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the art forms that I do master and domesticate, and have authority over.

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.

Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.

As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When I read a great novel - something that I could never have written myself - I'm still looking at it a little bit like a technician.

By removing the stories from the morass of things that surround us, I'm hoping to achieve some kind of purer approach to emotional life.

I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.

Apologies aren't something you want to get in the habit of practicing in the mirror