I bought an energy bar, and as I ate it a great weariness came over me.

I'd become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody's error in judgement.

There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten’s prose. Waste is an exhilarating and unnerving piece of fiction.

When a translator translates my book, it is no longer just my book. It is the translator's book, too. So the book in another language is almost the work of two people. And that is quite interesting to me.

Art is an artifice that you try to make seem natural.

No emotion or insight is too small to inflict on the world. Let it all fly. Don't let it eat you from the inside.

I am a writer who is definitely working with a specific language and more than English, that language is American. And I work very much in idiom and am very interested in the play of different kinds of rhetoric, whether it is the more high-flown stuff that reeks of age. I love to juxtapose something like that with something more current or urgent. I am always interested not in America by itself, but America as an idea and how that idea has changed over time, in the eyes of the rest of the world and in the eyes of Americans.