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.

Toronto is hard to capture in a few strokes.

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

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

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.

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

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