I very much like people. I don’t much like writers who don’t.

At home i let myself in and stopped, as if there was nothing for me to do and nowhere for me to go in the face of the pictures in my head.

She said that too often my tongue worked but not my head, or my head worked but not my heart.

I don’t think conservativism is about a deficiency. I think it’s about a commitment to an ideology that has to in some ways devalue the usefulness of empathy. I do think empathy can be learned. And enhanced.

Does research get in the way of the story? It certainly can. Anything can, given that as writers we’re all geniuses at procrastination. But mostly research teaches me about the world. Which often shows me the way, in terms of the story.

I think there’s a playfulness and a distance to Kavalier and Clay that I don’t aspire to in my stuff. Maybe I’m more old-fashioned, and less of a fabulist, in that way.

I’m tempted to do everything. And sometimes I think, “Oh, come on. You can stick that detail somewhere.”

I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours before daybreak when I was a boy, god sent me words as visitors.

What makes us threaten the things we want most?

I love the box that such a decision puts you in, and I love the interest the reader has in seeing how you negotiate that box: that seemingly hugely narrowed set of options. I also like the way in which it reminds us that we connect to the real world. That our relationship to the world matters.