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.

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

Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.

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.

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.

Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability" and "likability" thing.

If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.