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.

Song: Heloise and Abelard by Elizabeth Devlin. Beyond the a propros subject matter, this lady can really play the Autoharp. This song sounds like something you'd find on a gramophone record.

I try not to think too much or be too impatient, and let the back of my brain do its mysterious work.

The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.

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

It's not easy to make friends when you're an adult writer outside of academia, especially when you work alone in a little room for twelve hours a day, and so I wrote toward what I most longed for.

My son is actually named after Beck, the musician. We heard Beck on the radio and thought that was a good nickname for a child. We named our son Beckett so we could call him Beck - we reverse engineered. And then after he was born and I saw the name on the birth certificate I realized Beckett was a really pretentious name, way too literary. Luckily he's grown into it. We nearly named my second son Dashiell. Can you imagine? Beckett and Dashiell. It would have been a disaster of pretentiousness.