I think that life is incredibly violent and that individual people are incredibly violent on one level or another. I don't try to change life to suit my writing; in a certain way I'm a naturalist of the nineteenth century school.

When you're reading my book, you're not in a four dimensional continuum, you're in my continuum, the Grossman continuum.

I'm truly an outsider in the poetry world. When I started writing, I was trying to move my poems away from modernist lines.

I love grand scale. One of the things that everybody mentions is that my novels are beautiful objects in the sense that the elements of the actual book are being extruded and re-contextualized.

I don't think that brutality and idealism are mutually exclusive. It's a common denominator in my work - rabid idealism.

I have a strong spiritual commitment, and I try to express that in my work. Salvation cannot be worked out in human terms. The point of my writing is to touch upon the systematics of prayer and on how we arrive at a method of achieving spiritual coherence in our lives.

My books are not about different components that fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, it's about creating the space around the components, which is almost as important as the components themselves. And that space changes and blends depending upon what the components are.