To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can't imagine what that's like.
From Nicole Krauss
I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.
I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don't allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind.
You can't imagine how hard I am on myself. Nothing pummels me like my own doubts, the feeling of how far I still have to go.
The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition.
I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.
I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.
I used to think that if I had a choice between writing well and living well, I would choose the former. But now I think that's sheer lunacy. Writing weighs so much less, in the great cosmic equation, than living.
What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.
I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.
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