The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

There's violence in my culture [from America's South].

Gadgets are usually the last thing I think about, and if there's something new, I'll get to the store for the final shipment of the first generation when it's on sale. So I have last year's stuff.

I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.

Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.

The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.