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.

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 heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.

It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.

I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.

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.