Politics imagined as direct agency, whether by voting or by participating in politics, you can think you're not political because you don't do anything between elections.

I have a hard time imagining a country or a government where I would say, "Oh, this is good," where I could live under a government that I respect for a day or a week, even to see what it feels like.

A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

If I represent the world as it is as harmonious, that's a political position.

I've never meditated for a moment in my life. I don't know how it works. But one of the things you have to do to put yourself in the meditating mode is stop narrating yourself to yourself.

What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.