For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.

I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That doesn't interest me. I want everything to be essential.

When Rolling Stone handed me this crazy assignment to be in the studio with James Brown, they had the misapprehension that I'd written for them already just because I claimed my character had.

Once you fall into habits, I think, you're dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your laurels, never think about what you've done in the past.

Yet I'm making a book and I'm going to care immensely about what words get bound in the pages, and I want the object to look good. I won't believe in it and it won't be real to me until there's a finished book I can hold.

However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing position for the duration of the story.

It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.