I do find stories - or literary fiction - an apt form for analyzing the world. And especially for trying to imagine the other. An agenda, again, that seems more important now than ever.

I feel like one of the things I'm trying most to do is stretch my empathetic reach, as far as it will go. I got as far as Gilles de Rais' assistant, for example, and not really as far as de Rais himself.

I think fiction is all about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Part of what I do is let the stuff I read about meld with what I have experienced.

Class is the most taboo subject in America. The American media would rather talk about race or perversion or anything else considered taboo before class.

She thought she'd put up with however many years of stonewalling for a good reason, and she'd just figured out that as far as Castle Hubby went, she hadn't even crossed the moat yet.

The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself.

The protagonist of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours doesn’t make it easy for us, channeling as he does Barry Hannah and Denis Johnson by way of Rick Bass and Dennis Hopper, and self-presenting as yet another damaged romantic who thinks it’s always time to play the cowboy, skating in and out of sense. He can’t see right, and he’s haunted by nearly everything. He’s trying to open up or shut himself down or at least get a hold of himself. He’s trying to make do with what he’s done, while he reminds us that we’re all, one way or another, in that position.