I write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.

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.

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

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.

What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.

I don't mind arguing with myself. It's when I lose that it bothers me.

We don't consider the roles that we're taking in making the world the way it is.