When I get online, there's this cycle of anxiety and narcissism that takes over, which is the part of me that I like the least.

We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we're doing publicly, 'like'-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd.

The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout.

One of the ways I stuck out was I was a very passionate reader. There was probably a cyclical nature to that; the more I felt like an outcast, the more I sought refuge in books, and the more I sought refuge in books, the more it made me not speak the same language as my peers.

For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on.

I'm trying to focus on my job as I see it, which is to write the next thing and to remain, to the degree that I ever was, a noticer.