I love poetry, read it a lot, but make no claim to being able to write it.

Trauma, and certain important experiences, can imprint on us at a genetic level.

I'm not even sure if empathy is an act, it could be a disposition.

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

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

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.

There's some evidence that before events of mass trauma, even unpredictable ones, people begin to feel higher anxiety, often expressed in terms specific to the event.