Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.

Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.

Whenever someone asks me about fantasy versus realism, I'm like, "I don't know, guys. Did we not all just descend into some underworld, watch strangers from our past kaleidoscope through us according to some pattern that is both illogical and has its own strange melting truth, and then wake up and have a Pop-Tart?" Why are we talking about fantasy and reality like they're opposed?

It's funny, for a long time I would go watermelon-red and deny that I was a magical realist. It felt imprecise to me, a misrepresentation.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.