I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.

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'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.

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.

The world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.

I'm not planning what I listen to, except when I think the music can guide me to some emotional place I want to be reminded of.

I never have been a musician; I'm not actually capable. Because I can't even pretend to acquire the gift, all of my first feelings about art are still attached to music. I look at it yearningly, I look at it wonderingly. I behold it from afar, as something unattainable, something outside of myself, from which I can take nourishment, but I can't domesticate and master.