To me, when one is writing sometimes about a very specific subject with very specific people, I feel like if that story doesn't cross over, it's not working. That's very beautiful to me, to be sitting in Berlin and there's an actor reading my book in German. I don't even know what's going on, except I know to feel my own rhythms in another language and say, "If this is going well, I think everyone should laugh around now." Then maybe there's laughter, and for me, it reminds me of how story can move around the world.

I'd much prefer my books to shoes...In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.

I sometimes think about that, when I finish in something big I find it even hard, I feel like I lose an actual noticeable percentage of my reading time. Even on the reader end I find it so hard when a book that I love so much ends, to find the kindness to enter into a new one. Do you know what I'm saying? To find my way in, I feel like even there's that space after. I just love inhabiting a book that hits right.

I was thinking a lot about myself and my own super inextricably Jewish boy link with my mother. I felt like even a Jewish spy would have this relationship, so yes, I was very much exploring this relationship of boys and their mothers, and Jewish boys and their mothers. Exactly that, the ridiculous lengths that a doting mother will go for her son, and the ridiculous lengths that - I will pretend this is distanced from me - the ridiculous neediness of a grown man for a mother.

I feel like people who become writers are people who have been saved by books.

Turn off your cell phone. Honestly, if you want to get work done, you’ve got to learn to unplug. No texting, no email, no Facebook, no Instagram. Whatever it is you’re doing, it needs to stop while you write... A lot of the time (and this is fully goofy to admit), I’ll write with earplugs in - even if it’s dead silent at home.

I taught everyone a very bad lesson at my publisher because they actually gave me deadlines this time and I'm now meeting them. I used to say, "Here's my book; it's six years late." I'm so much faster now, and work differently. With all the years of writing, I think I still draft as obsessively, but I think back to writing. On your first story, you start at draft one. On your second story, you start at draft ten. On your third story, you start at draft one hundred. If you need a hundred and eight drafts, you may write eight instead of a hundred and eight.