Rebecca Makkai

I grew up writing. It was very natural in my household. My father was a poet, and his mother had been a novelist back in Hungary. I don't think I really thought about it being my career until high school, which is still pretty early, but it was a while there of just assuming this was something everyone did all day long.

Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is - sometimes seems impossible. Writing a novel, though, is - has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you're too close to see the whole thing.

I did teach elementary school for quite a while, and so I didn't have to reach too far back for the titles and authors that populate the early chapters 'of The Borrower.'

There's a great social component to being a writer, to being an artist.

Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.

When you talk to an author - to any artist, really - you learn something about how they do what they do. I've never come away from that kind of experience feeling disillusioned, as if the magician had explained his tricks. I always find a greater appreciation for the form.

I have the distinct feeling that when I'm old, and I look back on my life, my thirties will be one huge blur. There's a lot that gets neglected: exercise, dishes, laundry, my poor garden. I try to prioritize the important but non-urgent things over the unimportant but urgent things.

Despite its challenges, the novel offers an opportunity to live in one story for years of your imaginative life. There's a tremendous richness to that.

The times I've tried not to be funny, it's never worked, and the times I'm trying not to be dark and just be funny, that never works, either. As varied as my subject matter is, I think the worldview is pretty consistent: seeing darkness and seeing humor.

My sister's a musician. Everyone else in our family, it's either academics or artists of one kind or another. And those are the people that I think I like to hang out with, too. I think, you know, they're always interesting; they lead interesting lives, and I think they're important for everyone to read about because everyone is an artist in a way.

We're all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos. And that's what art is.

Sometimes I wish I could go back through time to meet Proust, just so I could give him my asthma inhaler. The poor guy.