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

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

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….

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

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

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

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..

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

We want to know that we're not alone with our loneliness or loss..

Toronto is hard to capture in a few strokes..

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

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 experienc….

There's some evidence that before events of mass trauma, even unpredictable ones, people begin to feel higher anxiety, often expressed in terms speci….

Trauma, and certain important experiences, can imprint on us at a genetic level..

We can't write a serious novel in the 21st century without acknowledging the inescapable self-awareness we're stuck with. The idea we're surrounded b….

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

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 tr….

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

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

Science is claiming ever more ground from popular stories of the kind we thought we weren't to believe in..