Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I’m as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

You have time. Meaning don't use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don't rush to meet it. Be a conduit.

I love to be alone, I find it necessary, but I don't know if that's just how I am or if it's an essential ingredient to making, to art. Certainly on a practical level it is. But on the other hand, I think it's a myth that the creative inspiration is locked up inside the person and just needs a quiet space and the right "serious" brooding moment to get released.

The VW doesn’t make you think of Hitler and genocide. It’s a breast on wheels, a puffy little dream.

I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don't identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the West, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles.

I am not a sun person at all. I think it's a cancerous poison and I don't want it touching me.

There was lots of pleasure in writing The Flamethrowers. Then again, what is pleasure? Some pleasure is easy and other kinds are never quite felt, existing only as the residue of hard work, or more as satisfaction than thrill.