I had a series of terrible jobs, whatever would allow me to write for four hours during the day. During that time I wrote three novels - all of which were extraordinarily poor. I decided after that to go and get my MFA.

Being a writer means I sit in a dark (and pretty dank) room off my garage for many hours a day, and in my wallowing moments I can feel as if I'm already on the outside of society, peering wistfully in.

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

As soon as you publish a book and the reader reads it, they're making an extension of your brain with their brain.

I'm kind of a control freak. But there are others like me.

Sex makes things strained. There are lovely people in Oneida, but everyone was married to everyone else. And you had fathers and mothers watching their twelve-year-old daughters being inducted into the group marriage by sixty-five-year-old men. There are creepy aspects of a lot of intentional communities when it comes to sex.

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