It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money..

I think most writers have to have a practice of writing. For me it is very early in the morning. I try to make it a separate world from the rest of m….

I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences..

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them..

Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete..

I like to buy books for the kids in my family. I guess that's why they call me the 'mean' aunt..

The issue isn't, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don't matter. Ability doesn't matter. Need is th….

My teaching exists in a different part of my brain. However, I am lucky enough to teach very smart graduate students..

The writer has to take risks and go somewhere full of mystery and possibility for the novel to deepen over the years it takes to write it..

The novel is about, for me, sustained and organized looking. I do think that people have a hunger for a sustained engagement, that concentration that….

Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are n….

I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up..

There's lots of things that can't make it in the world that are worth making. There are lots of great artists who never make it, there are lots of gr….

The writer has to be brave, I think..

I try to write about how we live today, how we use language, technology, our bodies..

We exist because of suburbia. Suburbia is a freak’s dreamworld, a world of extra rooms upstairs and long, lazy afternoons with no interference. A pla….

Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction wit….

Although a great restaurant experience must include great food, a bad restaurant experience can be achieved through bad service alone. Ideally, servi….

I am always trying to do something new and different. The first step is curiosity, questions. You pay attention to what fascinates you. If you can't ….

A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something cruci….

That was one of the reasons I became a writer - I never really had that many friends. I would read a lot, and listen to music. And that was my life..