The philosophy of individualism owes a great deal to the tradition of novel-writing and novel-reading. In its development and in its aesthetics, the novel is not politically neutral; it has been a participant in history all along.
Dialogue is the most fun to write. It's kind of like a tennis match.
I can't help feeling that I am not a very important person, and being treated like one gives me strange feelings.
What I really like about Woody Allen's films is that there's a real investment in personal relationships. There is the idea that this is a serious concern worth making serious art about - how we love other people and how we can negotiate our relationships with them.
I think the debating thing actually helped to establish to me that being popular was completely worthless. I didn't enjoy the social dynamic and immediately left after becoming number one. But it felt like I needed to do it to know what it was like. It wasn't just that I was an aggressive person, although that probably is true to an extent.
I hate Yeats! A lot of his poems are not very good, but some are obviously okay. But how has he become this sort of emblem of literary Irishness when he was this horrible man? He was a huge fan of Mussolini. He was really into fascism. He believed deeply in the idea of a 'noble class' who are superior by birth to the plebs.
The idea for 'Conversations with Friends' - two college students who befriend a married couple - struck me at first as a concept for a short story. I started to write it under the title 'Melissa,' and eventually, it got too long.
In everything I do, my principal inspiration is the 1996 Belle & Sebastian album 'If You're Feeling Sinister.'
I'm very introverted. Easily a few days could go by where I would not really leave the house or talk to anybody other than my partner.
The window in which it's acceptable to listen to Ella Fitzgerald's 1960 record 'Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas' is short, so I keep it in heavy rotation throughout the festive season.
You can spend hours editing an email but send it as if you wrote it in a minute.
I was on the Internet a lot during my teenage years, and I think the influence of that kind of textuality on my writing has been pretty significant.
What does it mean to have a healthy relationship? It's such a strangely clinical way of talking about interpersonal dynamics, like you can do a white blood cell count and say, 'No, it's not looking good for that one.' It's impossible to have a loving relationship in which you never cause pain and no pain ever is caused to you.
I find myself consistently drawn to writing about intimacy and the way we construct one another.
It really felt like my generation was deprived of a future that we believed was ours. I don't mean some hugely privileged future where we all have gigantic houses. I mean having a job.
I don't think of myself as busy because I don't even have to get dressed most days.
I try to keep my sentences quite pared back. What I really want to do is observe people's relationships and interactions. I don't want language to get in the way of that. It's quite a difficult process to achieve that, for the language to feel clear.
It's so difficult to be conscious of a development of a style. You find yourself writing in a certain style, and the analysis of how you came to it can only ever be applied retroactively. You're never conscious of why you're producing it.
As a reader, I try to love all the literary forms equally, but I probably read novels most often.
I would rather do two things really, really, really well than do 16 things and have 14 of them fail.
