Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows – the theme of parents and kids, for instance.

I write almost purely by instinct. I’ve never made an outline.

In LA, you think you’re making something up, but it’s making you up.

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I’m not interested in experiments for their own sake.

As the twentieth century was about politics, which is to say survival, the twenty-first is about God, which is to say oblivion, a subject his country is profoundly unprepared to contemplate.

The human heart commits its greatest treachery by healing. It commits its greatest treachery by surviving the love that was supposed to last forever, that was supposed to be the heart’s burden into eternity, only for that burden to be laid down by too much time and, worse, too much banality, too much of everything that’s beneath love, not good enough for love.

The material dictates the approach. I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them. Certainly the last thing I want is to be “difficult.”

This was the day his life split in two. Her name was Kara.

I’m my own “ideal reader” in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

You are surrounded by signs,” she said. “Ignore none of them.