Nicole krauss

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

For me, what I am making in the novel is a place to live. When I first switched from poetry to novels, I was asked why, and the metaphor I came up with was about poems as rooms. You can make a room...

I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.

I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.

The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.

You can't imagine how hard I am on myself. Nothing pummels me like my own doubts, the feeling of how far I still have to go.

The more freedom I allow myself as a writer to wander, become lost and go into uncertain territory - and I am always trying to go to the more awkward place, the more difficult place - the more...