Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.

I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it's imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it's an antidote to despair.

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.

I remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and put that under our eyes. So our faces were glowing - a kind of night vision.

When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.

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.