Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish.

I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.

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

I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.

My heart and the elevator, a plummet inside a plummet.

How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end. As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?

My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.