For me as a person, friendships are incredibly important to me, but in writing, they can distract me.

For me, even in my first book, the pleasures of writing anything magical is that it has to be physical. It has to be grounded and very much in this world. Then, I get to play with all the consequences of this new thing.

I love food. I'm not a great cook, but I love to cook, and I like how different it is from writing.

Writing can be a frightening, distressing business, and whatever kind of structure or buffer is available can help a lot.

I think teaching keeps me honest because if I'm up in front of a class talking about what I think is important about fiction while knowing I myself have just failed to do that hours earlier at my computer - it's a good and humbling reminder.

I don't eschew autobiographical writing, but I'm not interested in mine to be so straightforward. The things that tend to move me the most are often those that I have to figure out its meaning for myself. The human being's ability to make a metaphor to describe a human experience is just really cool.