I like to invent the dialogue that I want to have heard.

You learn to read in kindergarten or first grade, and suddenly there's this other world that isn't your family or your school or your friends. It's something else.

The Dutch and the English, former competitors for world dominance, taught me the wisdom of waiting as well as withholding.

I don't think anybody says to Coetzee or Dostoyevsky or Kafka, "Your characters aren't likeable." It's not about your character winning a popularity contest. That's not the writer's job.

I don't believe a picture is worth a thousand words, unless they're very confusing words.

You have to create the space for the possibility of people speaking as they do. If writing is supposed to lead us in any way or educate or suggest other ways of being, it can't do so by simply reflecting what's considered to be realistic.

It's easy, at this point in my life, very easy to write a beautiful sentence that's meaningless. A lot of writers do that. But I don't want it to be meaningless. I want it to actually say what I want it to say, and so I'm thinking about it again and again and again.