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.

Science is claiming ever more ground from popular stories of the kind we thought we weren't to believe in.

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.

It's fiction's job to express how it feels to be living now, and it's a complex feeling, full of contradiction. To me it often feels like a brutal trivialization of reality.

The idea that language can be recombined to create new forms, new things, is of course very old in poetry.

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.

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