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1. I think there is a real thing going on where writers are feeling more liberated to write with a big canvas because of a demonstrable, continued appetite for long-form storytelling.
2. I remember reading ‘The Hobbit’ on a car trip from Ohio to Mississippi and getting out at a rest-stop in Mississippi and feeling jet-lagged at my return from Middle-earth.
3. I always thought I was going to be a great poet, and go and live in New York, where the great poets lived — you know, where Whitman had walked the streets.
4. I had this dream that I was going to come to New York and be a writer.
5. I had one week in the fall of 1996 where I was like, ‘I’m America’s greatest living teenage poet.’
6. I came to feel that, in addition to Imre Kertesz, Hungary has produced at least three contemporary novelists who deserve the Nobel: Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy and Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
7. A fragmented film such as ‘Babel’ gives the impression of ‘edginess’ but, in its form, tells us nothing we didn’t already know.
8. I’m not confident in my own ability to resist the titanic force of my own ego.
9. I grew up in a university town in eastern North Carolina — what’s called Tobacco Road. It was very rural.
10. In graduate school, I was a student of E.L. Doctorow, and he had us read ‘Moby-Dick’ in a week.
11. The ego being shattered is not what frightens me — that can be useful for writing — but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout.
12. Reading isn’t about managing expectations. In certain ways, writing is. You’re trying to send signals early in a book about what might be coming later, but I think worrying about the kind of chatter around a book is something I try and stay as far away from when I’m reading.
13. In college, I was a huge fan of ‘Les Miserables.’ I seem to remember that people who were into French literature preferred Hugo’s poetry.
14. Reading was not just an escape or a Band-Aid; it was a deep form of feeling seen and recognized, and being able to see and recognize other kindred spirits. My dad was a writer, too, which also likely had something to do with that.
15. When I get online, there’s this cycle of anxiety and narcissism that takes over, which is the part of me that I like the least.
16. One of the ways I stuck out was I was a very passionate reader. There was probably a cyclical nature to that; the more I felt like an outcast, the more I sought refuge in books, and the more I sought refuge in books, the more it made me not speak the same language as my peers.
17. For some reason, I spent my early thirties reading as much postwar Hungarian fiction as I could get my hands on.
18. If I could do what Hilary Mantel does, I would probably do that. She is more intelligent and a better researcher and knows more what she’s about than I do.
19. Narnia, Middle-earth and New York were my three fantasy universes when I was a kid.
20. The writing that feels the best to me, I experience sometimes, is a kind of weirdly deep listening — like, it feels like if you just listen hard enough, the next sentence will tell you what it needs to be.