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 love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That's really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects - a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world. And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them - I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode.

I am trying to remember that things have certainly been crazier in human history and they may get crazier here and now, and [here I am trying to be optimistic] it's even a good thing, to be going through all of this, if only to be reminded that history hasn't stopped - human existence is as fundamentally unmanageable now as it ever was.

I know that my only chance at any kind of depth or profundity is to linger within the story, trying to make it distinguish itself.

The traveller must, of course, always be cautious of the overly broad generalisation. But I am an American, and a paucity of data does not stop me from making sweeping, vague, conceptual statements and, if necessary, following these statements up with troops.

Art is not some inessential frippery - it is the nation's means of intelligently regarding itself. To cripple or stigmatize the arts is to doom one's nation to a life of incuriosity, dullness, literalness and the worst kind of rank materialism.

I'm not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I'm just trusting that, if I'm working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.