Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.

Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.

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.

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

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.

Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.