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I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

Typically, a book is published and gets one season in the sun. Eventually, you write another book, and maybe your old books get a bump, but my books seem to keep being discovered and recommended to new people of all ages.

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

I only did about one novel a year while I was working full time, but since 1993, I've averaged two and a half books a year.

It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.

My first book is really comparable to what I do now, where it's pretty surreal and strange at moments, but that being my first book - I wrote that when I was 22; it came out when I was 24 - and it was just really overwritten. I just didn't trust myself as a writer to say something once.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

Some people take 10 years to write a book and some can do one in under a year.