I never know where I'm headed when I'm working on a book.

Because answers are inert things that stop inquiry. They make you think you have finished looking. But you are never finished. There are always discoveries that will turn everything you think you know on its head and that will make you ask all over again: Who are we?

I guess I'm drawn to stories of people whose physicality puts them on the outside of things in order to explore the ways in which an identity is formed around these prevailing attitudes.

In fact, not knowing is a necessary condition of writing for me. I don't know how else to reach something unexpected. I have to be as in the dark as my characters.

We are like flowers always reaching up towards some shred of light. I find this wondrous, nearly magical, certainly brave.

Why did people try to shush trouble away as if it were an unruly child?

But every age deserves its fashion and its forms, and no one can control what survives.