As someone who played music and never got famous, and remembers little fragments of that, I don't remember life as a dramatic flamboyant thing.

I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

The act of language or the act of denying language carries its own heaviness.

Part of being a writer is feeling that constant dissatisfaction, thinking about what else you could do, and also knowing when it's time to leave a project.

Another obligation that I have as a teacher is to make available to students a range of options and devices and approaches, rather than saying "well here's one way to do it and that's the only way that's good."

I cut hundreds of pages from my book because I felt myself being reiterative or redundant. Sometimes I wanted to leave just hints of things.

As someone who played music and never got famous, and remembers little fragments of that, I don't remember life as a dramatic flamboyant thing.