If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.

I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography.

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

That's why people take vacations. No to relax or find excitement or see new places. To escape the death that exists in routine things.

Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.