Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.

If you're part of any kind of writerly community, some of those people will have gone through MFA programs, and their thinking leaks into yours. So whatever changes MFAs have made to the culture, it's to the culture as a whole. It can't be pinned down to individual books in a way that some people would like to do.

Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.

Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work.

To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.

Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.