You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.

...the heart is an organ of fire.

A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.