I don't believe that fiction is dead. I know there are some people who believe that it's an outdated art form, and that to express truth today you need to work in different forms, to write books where it's perhaps not clear what's fiction and what's memoir. I have nothing against those books and love many of them very much. But we have enough space for everyone, traditional realists and hybrid writers, and experimental writers all.

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

Fiction is always a utopian task, in that there's an ideal you hold in your head as you write which inevitably fails in the moment of creation, in the insufficiency of words to convey meaning, or in the way the work is completed in the reader's head.

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

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.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

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