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.

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.

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

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

In my short stories there's a lot of focus on people successfully and not successfully responding to some sorts of discomforts or instabilities.

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.