On teaching literature:

“I love teaching fiction writing but I hate teaching literature, and I occasionally have to do it…It’s like analyzing a joke. It’s no longer funny; it takes the joy out of it.”

On writing:

“This was the first time I’ve ever written the first part of a book that stayed the first part of the book, and that’s still the opening of this book: a guy watching as a car pulls up, and his old rival arrives with his old lover.”

“The only way to create a plot is to have people misbehave. That’s, in a way, what plot is, is misbehavior and its consequences. If fiction is gossip, then plot is misbehavior and its consequences. Those are two pretty good rules to live by for a writer.”

On writing a book full of sadness that didn’t feel sad:

“For me, I always felt a tickle as I was writing it. From whatever voice I was in, there was always sort of a tickle…A story about a death is always a story about a life. That’s the power of it. It’s not the death that makes it sad, it’s the life that preceded it that’s gone.”

On Michigan:

“Michigan is a gorgeous, gorgeous state too. It’s the Maine of the Midwest. It’s kind of unknown to people on the coasts, but it’s really a wonderful state. It has beautiful water, beautiful lakes, some of the greatest beaches in the world.”

On rivalry:

“I do think that rivalry is an underappreciated emotion, or at least an under-discussed emotion, and it’s really a driving emotion for a lot of people. Especially people trying to do anything unusual or distinctive in the world.”

On the novel versus the short story:

“A novel is such an unwieldy piece of wool to begin with that, in some ways, a novelist is obligated to give it some structure so that the reader doesn’t flounder. Certain readers like to flounder. I am not one of those readers in particular.”

“In a novel, you have to have stronger logical connections. But in a short story, being short enough that you can hold it in your mind either as a writer or as a reader, you can actually afford to pull out some of those logical connections.”

On math:

“The math was hard. I’ve always loved math, but I don’t understand a lot of this math. I wrote the whole thing without researching. Maybe that was a mistake. I wrote the whole thing and then researched, and then had to correct it…No reader needs to understand it, but a reader needs to feel, or I hope a reader feels, what it’s like physically to try it. Also, math is not really equations. That’s an expression of math, but math is really an imaginative thing. It’s about thinking of new ways to solve a problem.

Mathematicians aren’t just trying to compute faster than the next guy. They’re being very creative. ‘Creative’ isn’t the right word. They’re being inventive, trying to find a key that will unlock something of undoable difficulty and make it doable.”

On intuition:

“It’s weird. You certainly get the impression that there’s a machine running, and we’re just hearing the little blips and beeps outside of it. That’s maybe what intuition is. It’s the outermost workings of that machine that are occasionally accessible to the outside.”

Read the complete interview here.