For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.

I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.

For me, [deep structures] might be something very simply to do with the split in my family. That's why I'm always thinking about opposites. It's so childish, really, but that might be simply what it is.

And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.

It's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.