The seeds of love have taken hold and if we won't burn together, I'll burn alone.

I do tend to look at my books in many ways as conceptual fiction, even to the point where I think the author's photograph is part of the package. And I have gone out of my way to select the photograph to connect to the subject matter of each book.

Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them.

With "Taipei" Tao Lin becomes the most interesting prose stylist of his generation...

But this road doesn't go anywhere,” I told him. “That doesn't matter.” “What does?” I asked, after a little while. “Just that we're on it, dude,” he said.

If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically.

Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.