Just in case God isn't dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.

I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.

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.

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability" and "likability" thing.

I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

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.