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

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.

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.

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.

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

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.