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.

Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.

Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.

What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility.

Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere?

I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

There's something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we are the main characters.