For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies - and it is free, and it is fast.

The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.

I'm often called obsessive, but I don't think I am any more than anyone else.

Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.

I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.