When I'm between projects, I keep a journal I call a 'thought log,' and it's my practice to write down whatever interests me.

Being scared by a movie offers a safe catharsis, because the terror is confined to the screen. It's an adrenalin spike, and when I come back down, I feel a bit more leveled.

A collection is, by my lights, a chance to build a universe, an overarching ecosystem. But it's common enough to encounter a hodgepodge instead, where flashes of brilliance are undercut by clunkers.

The past is an open wound, a life force busily shaping an increasingly bewildering present.

Like many American readers, I was first introduced to Magda Szabo's work when New York Review Books reissued the Hungarian master's profound and haunting novel 'The Door.'

We write in a culture that favors the heft of the novel. Better still if the novel in question is large enough to be wielded interchangeably as a doorstop and a weapon.

Like many artists, I have issues with anxiety and depression, so I try to live in a way that supports my mental health.

It's not easy to craft a novel that gradually erodes the reader's comprehension of the world, of reality and identity and the passage of time.

I'm pretty sure that I've never confessed in an interview my weakness for McDonald's Filet-O-Fish. The cheese is fake. Who knows what that 'fish' really is. It is gross. It is amazing.

Normally I'm the type who wouldn't bail on a responsibility unless dead on the side of the road, and I believe deeply in the importance of continuing to follow our own paths.

Often, contrasts bring art to life: the bright speck of paint on a dark canvas; the tightrope walk between humor and tragedy.

The moment when my husband and I clasped hands and turned from our officiant, newly wed, was the most light-filled of my life.

For three years, I lived in a miniscule apartment on Beacon Street, less than a mile from the Boston Marathon explosions.

When I'm working on a short story, I could duck into a bathroom at a crowded party and write a scene, which is to say I can work in a very incremental way.

Since childhood, I've been a fan of mysteries - 'Nancy Drew' lovers unite! - but 'Vertigo' struck me as an entirely new take on the genre.

Not long after watching 'The Passenger,' I wrote the first lines of 'The Isle of Youth,' which concerns twin sisters who swap identities and become ensnared in the Miami underworld.

As we know all too well, our early years are formative in ways it can takes us a lifetime to grasp. Those years leave deep marks; in that way, the stakes of childhood are inherently very high.

Children tell themselves stories, engage in self-delusion and fantasy, but those narratives are more evolving than calcified - and with that malleability comes both freedom and danger.

In the world of the American creative writing workshop, I've encountered teachers who are tempted to place, or have actually placed, a moratorium on child narrators. Students love to write them, but children come laden with complications.

When I was in grad school, my husband and I used to house sit for a couple in Harvard Square, so we have these amazing memories of great Cambridge summers.

I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.'

I think, in a lot of ways, if you really strip down some of the most compelling novels, in a lot of ways, they're detective stories.

I love noir, quite obviously.

When I first left Florida for Boston, I was so eager to shed my Floridian identity, perhaps some of my earlier surreal gestures felt hollow and unconvincing because they were not rising from the particular brand of the uncanny I knew best.