“I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.”

“Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent.”

“The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to...”

“It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like on...”

“What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos a...”