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

I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.

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.

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity.

A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions.

I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do. So, it's usually not too, too hard.

Much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum. To oppose them, to suggest that one category excludes the other, always feels bogus to me. The great Leonard Michaels line is "I wanted proximity to darkness, strangeness"? That's what I'd say I want from a book, regardless of where it falls on the fantastical spectrum - that suspense connected to a particular human character, rather than just some mechanized plot.