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.

All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.

America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice.

I read to make myself feel awake.

The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.

I have this tendency to take a little bit of questionable knowledge and riff on it.

Fiction is open to whoever comes in the door, as long as you come in energetically.