I'm not a sociologist, and the novel has often concerned itself with sociology. It's one of the generating forces that's made fiction interesting to people. But that's not my concern. I'm interested in psychology. And also certain philosophical questions about the world.

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.

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

I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.

The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.

All paths lead nowhere; choose one with heart...

It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.