Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.

In general, teaching writing makes me a far better reader because there's so many ways to write a good sentence or a good story, and as a teacher I'm obliged to consider them all, rather than staying in the safety of my own tendencies.

Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head.

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.

Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.

I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.

When I watch students make particular decisions about language, structure, and form, it sharpens my own thinking and my own development as a writer.