I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thicken before music starts - all these things have to be harnessed by the political. The libidinal has to be harnessed by the political.

The strange thing about the apocalypse is that it's uneven. For some people, it goes one way and for others another way, so that there's always this shifting relation to the narrative of the disaster. Sometimes apocalypses are just structural fictions, and sometimes they're real. Sometimes a narrative requires an end - the fact that the beginning was always leading somewhere becomes clear at the end. There's an idea that we're always in the middle, but we posit this apocalyptic end in order to also be able to project into the past or the beginning. I think that's true and false.

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

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

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.

Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me.