I try not to read my own books just because I would rather read somebody else.

Lot of stories in deceit, how characters deceive other people, but most of all, I think, how they deceive themselves. We're not as tricky as we think we are.

I write by hand in my notebooks and number the drafts, so I know how crazy I can get with this. Some writers, like my teacher Marilynne Robinson, she only writes one draft. I've thought about this a lot; I think it's because she writes it 80 times in her head before it comes out.

I beat a story to within an inch of its life - that's when I know its done. Not before, not after.

A collection, for me, is a book of very diverse stories that somehow speak to each other, across wide geography, across time, years, decades.

People have to follow their own strangeness. The minute they start making their own vision of the world flattened out so everyone can read it, they lose. I encourage people to be as awkward and odd on the page to capture their own way of seeing the world and not trying to see the world for other people.

I've spent so many years living in one place and imaging another.