I take literature as a really serious human activity. It's not just a playful thing. It can be hilarious and wonderful and performative, but I think it's really serious.

The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art".

A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it.

With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.

Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.

Momentum, in literary mosaic, derives not from narrative but from the subtle, progressive buildup of thematic resonances.

Thomas Jefferson went through the New Testament and removed all the miracles, leaving only the teachings. Take a source, extract what appeals to you, discard the rest. Such an act of editorship is bound to reflect something of the individual doing the editing: a plaster cast of an aesthetic-not the actual thing, but the imprint of it.