So the question really is, Why doesn't that pain make you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don't.

I can talk for a long time only when it's about something boring.

But it is curious how you can see that an idea is absolutely true and correct and yet not believe it deeply enough to act on it.

The style developed over decades, really, but I started out writing pretty traditional stories, then became impatient. It was a writer named Russell Edson who showed me that one could write in any way at all.

I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.

If you think of something, do it. Plenty of people often think, “I’d like to do this, or that.

We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.