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“There will always be a person who looks like a poem the earth wrote to keep you alive.”

“You come out of the room where everyone is doing karaoke and ask why I’m ignoring you. I want to say something that suggests I’ve endured some exotic, indescribable torture but a completely mundane thing has happened, which is that you have stopped loving me.”

“It wasn’t marketed as a mystery novel at all: it was presented as literary fiction, but I think it would be ridiculous to claim that it isn’t both. The book itself is one of the best arguments I’ve ever seen against that tired, lazy distinction. It’s unquestionably literary fiction. It dives deep into enormous themes: the wild human urge toward losing the self, throwing away one’s own limitations by dissolving into something limitless; how that urge can turn savagely distorted and destructive when it’s trapped by a hyperrational, hyper-individualistic society that doesn’t give it room to take its course; the unstoppable march of action and consequence, the immense and unforeseeable chain of events that one small choice can set in motion. The characters drive the plot, rather than the other way around. … it refuses to go along with the convention that says the real mystery is whodunit. For this book, the true mystery is deeper, buried inside the hidden places of the human mind: why the murder happened; what consequences it has for everyone it touches. … I aim to write mysteries that take genre conventions as springboards, not as laws, and never as limitations on quality or scope; books where the real murder mystery isn’t whodunit, but whydunit and what it means.”