I felt sure about wanting to look at a person's life that had been limited or damaged, but not necessarily ennobled, by loss.

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

I don't know whose sensibility I'm responding to. Until someone starts pushing against what they've inherited and starts making their own decisions about language, it's difficult.

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.

If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, I felt myself drawn to writing a female character who was pretty flawed and not very virtuous or wonderful or attractive in these ways that throughout literary history we've come to expect female characters to be.

It just fascinates me, those private mechanisms that we use to make sense of the world - whether they have to do with the five senses or not. I think literature is one of the only kinds of art that truly lets us into that.