It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you'd find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual.

I have a feeling that books are a lot like people - they change as you age, so that some books that you hated in high school will strike you with the force of a revelation when you're older.

We need the skeletons of other stories to understand our own, sometimes.

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.

Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving.

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.