Meditation forms a part of my daily life and it guides my mind into the necessary space for writing. It seems that I enter some kind of alertful trance when I work. I become the moment in which I am writing. And yet I am there, the author, standing in the river and meddling with the flow.

Writing is following the sky of your mind. Who knows from where the winds blow. Or perhaps we are diviners. You cannot see the spring beneath but suddenly there is a twitch in the stick.

I believe it is worth writing to remind ourselves of what we can’t know. To remind ourselves that certainty is dangerous. That factual knowledge of the world casts only a small light. Fiction is necessary because it seems to me that only fiction can accommodate the total strangeness that is life. To remind us that truth is actually impossible.

Writing is rewriting and though there are many passages in my books that are essentially a first take, everything else can take many, many attempts before it finds the ideal shape. And what makes it ideal? I know it when I read it.