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

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.

My childhood was as conventional as you could get.

I'm always hungry for people.

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

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.

Research is about following the gleam into the dark. It's also about being sensitive enough to know which fact is "the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders," as opposed to the fact that deadens and kills a delicate new project.