It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations - it's a crazy, wild gift.

I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.

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.

I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.

I hope that in my thirties I grow as a writer, push into new territory.

I do think there's something when you have an unbroken day, and it feels like you and your attention can just be together like birds again and you can actually think and dream a little.

I often felt myself to be an outsider, which is great training for all writers.