Family seems so rich and complicated to me. There's meant to be this unfailing biological loyalty and yet at the same time it's this theatre for vari….

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and….

I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard..

My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives..

With students, one is often in the position where you have to be authoritative about what they're doing and connected to some principle. I prefer not….

Sorry, I said to myself, wondering how many times in my marriage I'd said that, how many times I'd meant it, how many times Claire had actually belie….

When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at t….

Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks..

Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children..

A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it..

My goal, with whatever I'm working on, is to lose track of time..

Being with him was like being alone underwater - everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurf….

I'm an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard's books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work - the pursuit of darkness, the negative - and I think i….

I don't like real places, but I don't like imagined ones either. I feel like I'm looking for some mixture and it's very hard for me to say because I ….

I always, at least back then, struggled with emotion in writing. I felt like I could do odd, unusual things, but there wouldn't be enough feeling in ….

I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow..

The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it ….

RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly disp….

I work, and then I leave the office, and I'm with my kids and just sort of enjoy them on a visceral level, and I don't feel like I'm exorcising my ow….

Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there's nothing to be done about them..