I'm a big lover of America. I love the people, but also the weird berms, the strange little high schools tucked away in different places, and just the whole geography and the psycho­logical apparatus of Americans.

I was, not an altar boy, but a reader of the Epistle, and I walked in on a nun and a priest furiously French kissing when I was in seventh grade. I walked in, saw it, and went, "No way," backed out, composed myself, and went back in, and it was still going on. And the experience of seeing that was actually very deep.

As a writer I'm essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.

Even if something within me is ugly, writing is a pretty good place to play with that thing and to begin to really see it.

In my personal and spiritual life, I reject that. I don't believe in that. I'm always trying to get my mind into a less judgmental place, making less rigid judgments about things like "perverse" versus "pure." But in terms of prose, those sorts of oppositions seem to work.

Compassion doesn't have to be weak or enabling; it can also be quite bold.

That's one of the reasons I take a lot of consolation in fiction. You have years to work on it. I think that allows you to reach for the best part of your reader instead of a lot of the internet stuff, in which you're kind of reaching for the worst or the most shallow part of your reader.