For many years I didn't have health insurance.

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.

I play American football every Saturday, which I find calming.

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.

Looking at and shaping your own work is a very intuitive process. You see something you've written in your notebook. It's there on the page and either feels right or it doesn't, and it's hard sometimes to go beyond that and discover why it feels that way.

Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.