One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair,' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. 'World's Fair' was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book.

I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.