The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

I didn't want to write another book about fraudulence.

I'm aware of narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative and then those stories - not the experiences themselves - might become material for art. This kind of transformation shows up a lot in 10:04 because the book tracks the transposition of fact into fiction in the New Yorker stor

Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.

I don't think "I'm going to publish this as fiction" but I think "I'm going to tell this story to a friend" and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it's already happened.