The real past can traumatize us, but so can the real future.

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.

Absurdity isn't quite so absurd as it once was.

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.