I was trained in seismic prospecting. We'd drill a deep hole and put dynamite in the bottom and blow it up remotely, which would give you a cross-sectional picture of the subsurface, which tells you where to drill.

I feel nervous because I revere [Zadie Smith] so much. I don't want to be stupid. If I say something stupid, just interrupt me.

What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.

Still, accomplishment is unreliable. "Succeeding," whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there's the very real danger that "succeeding" will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

If you start with the idea that you are going to be writing about a night in a graveyard, and that there are only a few living people in that frame, all sorts of interesting and difficult technical problems arise. And then form - new form, or experimental form - might be understood as just trying to tell that story most movingly and efficiently.

My stories, I can understand them as a little toy that you wind up and you put it on the floor and it just goes under the coach. That I get. Beyond that, I'm a little lost.

I think this is the other big issue that is not going away: Do we really believe that bit in the Constitution or not? I think we do.