I’d been rereading stories from Tanakh—I was fascinated by the very ancient origins of the stories in Genesis and Job—and that what struck me, what interested me, was how thoroughly we misremembered them, how the popular recounting of the stories of Creation and the antediluvian world and the stories of the Patriarchs had flattened them into coherent tales that satisfied quite modern ideas about the shape, texture, and structure of narratives, but that how, when you returned to the original texts, what you found was an extraordinary strangeness.

A writer is like a pickpocket: they what belongs to others and make it their own. But in doing so they are inevitably caught, not by the police, but by their own story. You think you write about other people, cheating or deceiving or committing a crime, but it’s always you who’s committing the crime, as you merge with your protagonist. And the reader, sitting on his couch, identifying with the characters, is committing the same crime with you, in his own living room.