I hope a book like mine will strike someone as violating a lot of common sense ideas about literature. I know it will. It violates my common sense about literature, and I wrote it.

Terrorism seemed absurd to me. There was a widespread belief in liberal circles that terrorism was caused by poverty, when in fact most well-known terrorists in modern times have come from middle-class families, have degrees — often multiple degrees — and have lived between cultures. It’s the torn people, who try to make meaning out of their alienation — often in destructive and self-destructive ways — that interest me.

There is something poignant and beautiful in those fractures in your ordinary life, the moments when you realize that you were mistaken or insufficient or what you did had an unintended consequence. The clarifying and humbling experience of shedding your delusions.

You mistreat animals, you eventually will mistreat human beings. If you’re casual to animal life you will eventually be casual to human life.

I wrote the last sentence of the story first, and then the next to last sentence, and so on for as long as I could — maybe I could have done it all the way back, but at a certain point I got really interested in figuring out how it started.

I’ve always thought that, the point at which I get tired, the point at which I get jaded, the point at which I start to think that’s it’s all been done, that all of the great or interesting movies are in the past, that’s when I should stop and get out of the way and let someone else do it.

When I ran out of money, I moved to my Mom’s in Maine, Charles D’Ambrosio-style, writing in her basement every morning starting at 5 a.m., taking a break for 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' reruns at 11 a.m. and making an early lunch before working more. It was like the weirdest saddest colony stay, about three months.

It’s just that everybody, every character, will die eventually. Wow, that’s totally bleak. I’m trying to convince you that it’s not, but it totally is.

I’ve come to suspect that what we call talent is a little hard to distinguish from this other thing that is this bottomless interest by the problems posed by paint or astrophysics or whatever it is.

The books don't matter, the reviews don't matter, the career doesn't matter, the students don't matter, though I love the language of all these things. Only the process matters. I have no skepticism about that, and I'm not exhausted.

This culture is like a chimera before which I stand agog.

I have seen that what makes tyrants afraid is not military might. The first people who are sacrificed in these regimes are journalists and writers and poets, and actually those who teach humanities. Those are at the forefront of the struggle and are targets.

As far as identity in literature, I think we’re coming to a place where readers have so many options. Eventually readers will read about everything and it will happen organically; it wouldn’t even be a thought. There’s so many books out there by such a diverse group of writers that readers won’t have to try hard to find diversity. Hopefully we can get to a point where diversity is the norm.

I realized that the word “witch” has a lot of power for me. It’s a scary word to apply to yourself. There was a little shock to me in the realization that I wanted to go that far.

I don't know of any profession where you experience failing as consistently and unambiguously as writing.

I have a feeling that a piece of furniture with a sex thing built into it came and went fairly swiftly. The furniture has fairly quickly been superseded by the advances in robotics.

You know this as a writer — it’s mostly torture. You have those days when you say, 'This was a great day! The writing went well!' And then if you actually paused and walked back through the writing hour by hour you would realize, 'No, it was still mostly torture, but it was a kind of exquisite and joyous torture on this day, as opposed to the gray horrible torture that it is on most days.'

While I do think vaguely of my audience, I write whatever I’m inclined to write, because a writer shouldn’t outguess or in any way condescend to her audience.