In a way, I see my fiction as having moved in that direction - and the characters as dealing simultaneously with their personal history and with the present in which they are trying to make their way. So that the books are simultaneously about public and interior events. And I am having a great time getting confused and crazed writing about them.

I enjoy going to campuses and reading and doing a class or teaching and then running away and not having to grade papers.

It's hard to read real fiction. It takes time. It takes a sustained attention.

If you can propose a memoir, even if you are eighteen years old - and what do you remember? What are you memeing? If you can propose a memoir, I believe someone will pay you to write it. And you will get a contract for nonfiction. And if it is about victimology in one way or another than you'll get more money. It's a sensation.

People do not read, by and large. They watch television.

I don't think the world is particularly responsive to - our world, the culture we are in, to art right now.

The culture is with some rapidity fearing its imagination. I don't know why. Imagination is not of interest.