Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity.

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.

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.

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

Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity.

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.

I don't think "I'm going to publish this as fiction" but I think "I'm going to tell this story to a friend" and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it's already happened.