I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.

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

The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.

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

I don't think it's always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn't imply people aren't multi-dimensional.

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.

I'm aware of narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative and then those stories - not the experiences themselves - might become material for art. This kind of transformation shows up a lot in 10:04 because the book tracks the transposition of fact into fiction in the New Yorker stor