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" I never listen to music when I write. It's too much of a distraction. "

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" There should be characters and situations that we cannot identify with, that retain either too much horror or too much wonder to allow for simple identification. That feels to me like an accurate depiction of what it is like to be in the world, rather than a neutered register of continual empathy. "

" It's hard, but I try not to think of happiness as either pending or in the past. "

" I think it's poignant and powerful, this idea that if someone knows your name, they have the ability to kind of hail you and make demands upon you. "

" It took me a long time to accept that I was a writer. "

" How do we describe the fact of human existence? At a certain point, perhaps, style fails us. Language, even and in particular at its most evocative, becomes less of an aid and more of a difficulty. "

" Modern sport can be an ugly convergence of commerce and celebrity, but it still has the capacity to move a crowd. "

" The first fight I saw live, the fighter I was shadowing lost in front of a crowd of forty thousand people. The scale of that is staggering to me. Undergoing that overlap between something very personal and something very public strikes me as both admirable and also somewhat terrifying. "

" We act in ways that are mysterious to ourselves. "

" The idea of physical strain and discipline, the question of how and when you leave that life behind - they're things I'm familiar with on one level or another. "

" I am generally wary of the demand for 'likeability' in fiction, which I think is a bastardisation of the demand of identification - itself something of a suspect notion. "

" People remain unknowable to us, even people that we're very close to. And I think the same goes for our own selves. "

" Generally speaking, there's some quality of compulsion that attaches itself to the idea of the list. It's true that lists organise the daily chaos of working life. But the impulse to make lists has to do with something more than either administrative practicalities or the record of a creative process. "

" The canon is dominated by books written by men, about men, and for men - the male voice is therefore not a particularly difficult one to impersonate. "

" There's a long relationship between science fiction and the 'novel of ideas,' and I think writers of science fiction are able to draw on that tradition to take risks, to constantly raise the level of their ambition. "

" One thing about having children is that even as it complicates many aspects of your life, it simplifies others. "

Having Children

" I pretty much admire anybody who has the discipline and the will to make a career out of fighting. It takes buckets of nerve. "

" It's difficult to identify why two cultures will react differently to the same sport. "

" I was introduced to fighting by my brother - he's a tattooer, a tough guy - and I completely fell in love with it. I was watching fights on YouTube all the time. I would go to parties to watch UFC fights. "

" The alchemy of a fight card is a mysterious thing. Even the most meticulous matchmaking can sometimes misfire. "

" There's something about being a woman and being able to dress up in men's clothing, so to speak. "

" In a fight, you don't need much context for drama. You watch a fight, and that's it. "

" I'm not one to probe my limitations. "

" I think there's such a fine line in a relationship. The role of imagination and privacy... how much space can you allow before that becomes distance? And similarly, imagination is empathy. That's how you achieve empathy. It's how you can be with another person and understand how they are in the world. "

" For about as long as I've been writing fiction, I've kept a record of the books I've read. "