I just noticed recently that in one book after another I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically simply, is allowed to talk crazy.

I'm a serial deconstructor of my own authority in certain areas.

I’ve always been uninterested in boundaries or quarantines between tastes and types, between mediums and genres.

As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When I read a great novel - something that I could never have written myself - I'm still looking at it a little bit like a technician.

When people call something "original," 9 out of 10 times they just don't know the references or original sources involved.

No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory.

Being blocked, being uncertain, sitting there not knowing, waiting, abiding with it: this is the work. If you don't have the tolerance for that you're in great trouble. If you want to call it a writer's block... that doesn't seem a very useful name for that kind of abiding that I think is the essence of the work.