I'm a person of whim, and easily distracted. I don't like multitasking. When I'm doing one thing, I like to do just that thing.

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

I don't believe in a perfect world. I don't believe it's achievable, and I believe the people who try to achieve it usually end up turning it into something like Cambodia or something very similar because purity tests set in. Are you ideologically pure enough to be allowed to live? Well, it turns out that very few people are, so you end up with a big powerful struggle and a mass killing scene.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.

If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.

Optimism means better than reality; pessimism means worse than reality. I'm a realist.