If you want to be good, all you've got to do is be good.

In a sense my whole life as a writer is trying to find structural ways, or formal ways, to permit that outflowing so it doesn't just look like crazy output. In other words, if it turns out that you can do a given voice, that's just kind of inclination. But then if you can find a way to put that voice in a story so that the voice serves a purpose, then I would say that's being a writer.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences - where things turn out better than you thought they would - ought to be in there somewhere, too.

When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn't see it. He can't. He's average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.

Sometimes I just turn on the TV and I'm like, wait a minute, that guy [Donald Trump]? It's incredible that he did all those things and he still won. It's hard to process.

When I'm explaining something to you, if I'm being long-winded, and twisty in a non-productive way, I could make you feel vaguely insulted. And you'd have a right to be.