I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.

If the literary category of 'mordant fable' exists at all, it may be because Brock Clarke invented it. The Happiest People in the World is everything we fans have come to love from a Clarke novel: playful and deliriously skewed, and somehow balancing between genuinely great-hearted and gloriously weird.

Sex is a good starting point for everything.

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

Reading about utopianism, and eventually creating characters with their own utopian ambitions, was the way I learned to live with being a pregnant person, to stave off the sense of incipient disaster. You're bringing a person into this overcrowded world, knowing they're one day going to die and there's nothing you can do about it.

It's wonderful that nothing you write is ever going to be as beautiful as what's in your head, because that gap is where the art can enter and begin to stretch its limbs.

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