I don't like having a teaching job - office hours and conferences and committees and bosses and all that - but I tend to enjoy teaching, and I design the course in such a way that there'll be pleasure in that.

You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.

Every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate - it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it.

I think it's interesting, from a creative point of view, to have witnessed the loss of consciousness on a national level and on a cultural level - Bush had 91 percent support in the polls after 9/11. We wanted to kick some ass!

I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability — the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.

My books have been published all over Europe. They read me there, and I want to read them back. I also spend a lot of time in Europe, often meeting writers, and I'm sick of apologizing for the embarrassing shortage of translations in America.

Wherever there's capitalism there's this inclination toward simplicity. There's also a human need to process complicated things by turning them into something else.