So this was what it felt like to lose yourself. Again. To let go of your future and let it rise up and up until finally you couldn't see it anymore, ….

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that….

Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways that he screwed up wou….

You can go on like this for a very long time, and no one will notice. You keep thinking you're going to hit some sort of bottom, but I'm here to tell….

I've never been able to sleep very much, even when I was a kid. I used to hate being forced to lay in bed in the darkness, and just shifting in bed a….

Fiction is fun because you get to steal an identity and try to make it authentic..

The happiest I have ever been is in the life that I led with my wife and kids..

A lot of time, with stories, I'll start out with a title and try to dream myself into the story that it evokes - a kind of subconscious exercise in w….

At a certain point, you must be able to slip loose. At a certain point, you found that you had been set free. You could be anyone, he thought. You co….

Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story..

In the end, there probably isn't much difference between being in love and acting like you're in love..

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future..

In some ways all of my fiction is like a conversation I'm having with the writers I read when I was first falling in love with books..

I usually have more than one thing I'm working on at once - I've been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and fort….

You can't count on notoriety lasting very long, and there's no way to predict whether anyone will care about your books or you in three years, let al….

Maybe it's because I grew up during the MTV generation, but to me a perfect song is one I can imagine a music video to, a song that can take you into….

Identity issues are hardwired into the way I think about character - it's almost as if I can't get away from them even if I want to..

I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them..

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be lik….

If no one knows you, then you are no one..

Maybe love, like suffering, is relative..