All of my writing career is about how human beings negotiate dark matter.

There are all kinds of under-represented groups in the literary establishment.

We inherit plots. There are only two or three in the world, five or six at most. We ride them like treadmills.

I am extremely interested in how people negotiate catastrophe, not because I'm morbidly interested in it but because I'm interested in the secret of resilience; that's what I'm always exploring in the stories and the novels.

The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words... and then you start to create a work of art, and that's another miracle, and it remains mysterious to the writer, or to this writer anyway.