I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.

Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.

In art and life we're always reading bodies and behaviors (and skies and skylines or whatever), constructing brief and shifting coherences, and I guess I want to capture that process of characterization and re-characterization instead of offering up a few stable, easily-summarized individuals.

I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

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.

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