Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.

Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.

We will live with racism for ever. But senses of self, senses of belonging, senses of us and of others? Those are up for grabs.

I'd like, each time out as a writer, to reinvent who I am and what I'm doing. That's one of the great pleasures and rewards of the occupation.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours.

I keep a quotes journal - of every sentence that I've wanted to remember from my reading of the past 30 years.