For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.

I’m forever writing around a void—I guess I don’t have to explain to you why that is.

Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.

I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.

So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.

The world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.