Every writer knows that when you're imitating somebody - you know, you're sounding like Faulkner - you're doing pretty good, but your life in Hoboken isn't Faulkneresque. So you get that kind of shortfall between the actual experience of the writer and the things he's hungry to express and the voice itself.

More and more these days what I find myself doing in my stories is making a representation of goodness and a representation of evil and then having those two run at each other full-speed, like a couple of PeeWee football players, to see what happens. Who stays standing? Whose helmet goes flying off?

So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.

I had an experience a few years ago where I was on a plane in which one of the engines went out. I couldn't even remember my name. I was just repeating the word no over and over.

[Writing] is almost like those boats that sit really low in the water; they look kind of ugly. And then you get one of them up to 80 miles an hour and the hull comes up, and it's a beautiful thing. I'm okay with that for myself.

Monologues, in some ways, are the most scientific descriptions of consciousness and even of gatherings.

I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.