Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?

It's more like I write multiple first drafts, handwritten. So with my first novel, I wrote whole drafts from different points of view. There are different versions of that novel in a drawer on loose-leaf sheets. I won't even look at the first draft while I'm writing the second, and I won't look at the second before writing the third.

It's not easy to make friends when you're an adult writer outside of academia, especially when you work alone in a little room for twelve hours a day, and so I wrote toward what I most longed for.

Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.

I'm a writer, not an actor. I want to write rather than perform. I'm looking forward to disappearing for a while.

The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.

When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.