Literature helps us transcend ourselves.

When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.

I think I've always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was 'your' boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get 'you.'

Love is transient even on a very personal level. We lose everyone that we love. Sometimes we drift apart and sometimes we die.

Novel writing is solitary work.

We're all united in this, that every human being migrates through time, that the place we grew up in in our childhood is gone when we're in our 50s and 60s and 70s.

In Italian, the word for novel is romanzo, "the romance." The English is "novel" - something new. Both of those elements, experimentation and love, are fundamental to the form.