There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

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.

In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.

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.

Fiction helps me to reconnect with the true, deep weirdness inherent in everyday reality, in our dealings with one another, in just being alive.

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

When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.