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

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

I won't walk under scaffolding or under ladders. I wear things like a baseball player wears things that are supposed to have luck. I am superstitious about everything.

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.

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

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.

If there's a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.