Novels shouldn’t aspire to answer questions, and I wouldn’t presume to offer advice about love or marriage in any case. What’s fascinating to me about marriage as a subject for fiction—a subject that fiction has taken on with gusto since the 19th century—is how unknowable other people’s relationships are. Even the marriages of your parents, your siblings, your closest friends always remain something of a mystery. Only in fiction can you pretend to know people completely.

I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.

In America you make your plans and then they happen.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

If somebody says your story is only published because you look nice in the photo, that maybe spurs you on to write.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.