I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line. It's a weird way to move forward. It's kind of like a way to caterpillar your way through these great woods. The best ones, whatever I feel like I'm writing about, some other secret thing will begin to come into focus.

If you're gonna do something weird, just have one thing be weird.

I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.

But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.

I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.

Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself.

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.