It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with.

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.

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.

I do not consciously reclaim. I am not those "some readers" and so I think it would be impossible for me to see my work that way, as reclaiming a preserve. I write in a way that is aimed at all levels - conscious and unconscious - at pleasing the kind of reader I am. Some of the authors I read are male, some are female, and some are even in between. And speaking of in between, maybe now is as good a moment as any to point out that there might be no "feminine" or "masculine" literary sensibility, or sensibility generally.

Writing is a way of living. It doesn't quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It's a way of being alive, for the writer.