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

Nonfiction gives you subjects. Writing fiction I can have more fun, but I have to invent my subject.

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.

I think the major device for me is that narrator's voice. I'm always trying to find a different kind of form to tell whatever story it is, and I wish that weren't so, because it drives me crazy.

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.

As a reader myself, which precedes my being a writer, of course, I read in order to enter another world.

Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.