The real past can traumatize us, but so can the real future.

I'm not even sure if empathy is an act, it could be a disposition.

Novels seem to exist because of this need to know and connect, and so story becomes charged with necessity.

I like a great degree of compression. I like to mix lateral steps with forward ones. I don't want the prose ever to feel simply functional - at least not for any stretch.

I love poetry, read it a lot, but make no claim to being able to write it.

I seem always to have two or three novels going at once. It takes me a long time to finish one.

Paranoia can be a sign of a sanity in some circumstances, in some places and times.

I just write what I want to read, and sometimes keeping it interesting means adding one more element that ends up adding another year to the work.

The idea that language can be recombined to create new forms, new things, is of course very old in poetry.

The novel's not the best form for disposing ideas, though that's one thing it can do. It likely is the best form, though, for conveying the experience of us each being alone, trapped in our skulls with only these bodies and this imperfect instrument of language to convey our state and to find meaning and connection.

We're getting used to reality and fantasy passing into each other. Much of the border between them has been erased.

It's fiction's job to express how it feels to be living now, and it's a complex feeling, full of contradiction. To me it often feels like a brutal trivialization of reality.

Many of the concepts we once thought belonged to speculation or science fiction are now part of our understood reality.

Absurdity isn't quite so absurd as it once was.