I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.

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

Parenthood means becoming comfortable with the fact that there are things outside your control, things that end and fail, just as most utopias end and by some measure fail. And just because they're a failure doesn't mean there isn't value there.

If you look at communal experiments in general for any amount of time, you'll find a lot of horrors: raped children, sexual slavery, eugenics experiments, on and on.

Writing by hand is a way of letting mystery into my writing. But I'm constantly trying to figure out how to do this job. It's a work in progress.

As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.

Our human impulse is to control everything, but fiction seems to me to be about allowing an element of mystery into the text.