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.

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.

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.

I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.

What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.

I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.

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