I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow.

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

While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.

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

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.

You need the art in order to love the life.

I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers-the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally reveals not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage points of passage.