The problem is that if you're self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn't something lost - some kind of presence? You're distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.

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.

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

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

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

In art and life we're always reading bodies and behaviors (and skies and skylines or whatever), constructing brief and shifting coherences, and I guess I want to capture that process of characterization and re-characterization instead of offering up a few stable, easily-summarized individuals.

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