Sometimes I think fiction exists to model the way God might think of us, if God had the time and inclination to do so.

That's what a story must feel like to me. It's not, "I want to write about a gravedigger." But you're walking along and - boop! shovel. "Ok, what does one do with a shovel? Digs a hole. Why? I don't know yet. Dig the hole! Oh, look a body."

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

There might be a different model for a literary community that's quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity.

I see that being looked at askance as a form of elitism now, which is really scary.

In Catholicism, we would say you're going to be judged, so therefore you should do better now. For me, Buddhism is somewhat more workable because instead of saying I have to do good, it says I have to notice what I'm actually doing.

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.