I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.

Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.

I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.

With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you're on page 300. You can't do that with film. It just charges ahead.

I've discovered that like every writer, I'm helpless MYSELF - and that means I find myself unconsciously or semi-consciously repeating motifs and themes and even using certain words or images recurrently in my work, no matter how much I think I'm starting fresh. But I've always admired artists who made a specific sport of trying to visit different kinds of genres or mediums or modes - not just 'western' or 'detective', but comedy/tragedy, epic and miniature, traditional/experimental.

I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.

I don't have a lot of paper in my immediate work environment, except when I'm doing things like checking the godforsaken proofs.