I seem always to have two or three novels going at once. It takes me a long time to finish one.

We're getting used to reality and fantasy passing into each other. Much of the border between them has been erased.

I like a great degree of compression. I like to mix lateral steps with forward ones. I don't want the prose ever to feel simply functional - at least not for any stretch.

We want to know that we're not alone with our loneliness or loss.

Novels seem to exist because of this need to know and connect, and so story becomes charged with necessity.

Many of the concepts we once thought belonged to speculation or science fiction are now part of our understood reality.

I just write what I want to read, and sometimes keeping it interesting means adding one more element that ends up adding another year to the work.