Novelist

'A High Wind in Jamaica' is like those books you used to read under the covers with a flashlight - only infinitely more delicious... and macabre.

My grandmother was not a great storyteller.

I hadn't meant to do the pattern of publishing short stories and then a novel. I thought, 'I'm a novelist. I know it.' But you have to kind of write a lot of bad novels before you can write a good one, I think, so I did that. But meanwhile, I loved the short stories I did.

Can you call and thank reviewers? I always wondered that.

My own accumulation of influences is actually what made me a writer in the first place.

They had a contest where they would - for some reason, someone in the past loved musical theater, and so if you wrote a musical, they would fully fund it and put it on the main stage with full costumes and a set and everything, and my roommate said we should totally do that.

Both my parents were atheists, and my grandmother was an atheist in rural Kentucky, and so they were trying to make sure that my brother and I would be atheists, too, and it worked, which doesn't mean that they didn't teach us a lot of wonder of science and of nature and the world and all of that.

Definitely for writing, what inspires me is poetry, which I have next to me all the time because I think they're doing what I'm doing, but much harder, more condensed. It's the same job, but they're more talented. All of them. So I just steal openly from them.

Travel is hard, and it's mostly not your fault.

My grandmother wore a beehive hairdo even when it was out of fashion.

For writers: don't hold back. Be weird. Be sentimental. Be melodramatic. Take the risk of being not-cool, not-hip.

Any gay man in America redeals a deck at some point.

It's funny how the present can change the past.

I heard you had to get 200 rejections before you got published.

I think what shaped me was I had two parents who were scientists, and especially, they were great readers. They had both grown up in sort of rural parts of the South and were oddballs where they grew up. They were budding intellectuals.

I have to get three pages done every day, and there's usually a point about 150 pages in where everything falls apart, where all the plans are for naught. The book has become something else, and I have a nervous breakdown, and then I submit to what the book has become, and I keep going, and that's a terrible and then a great time.

It's hard to tell if I've had writer's block because it seems to me that it's when nothing comes, but, you know, every day you stare at that computer screen, and I think, 'It's never going to happen today. How can I write three pages?' And the hours pass, and they haven't shown up, and then at the very end it always happens, so it's willpower.

A lot of problems get solved in those sort of in-between moments when your subconscious has been working on some problem. If you keep it spinning, you can fix ideas sometimes better than if you focus on them directly.

I have come to this conclusion: if 'sentimentality' is lazy emotion, then the term itself is lazy criticism.

I do think that Americans do not understand that things are done differently in other parts of the world and that the other ways people do things are equally accurate ways to do things. Someone else just came up with something different.