I unlearned the model of being an editor like Ezra Pound with T.S. Eliot, the unconscious belief that America was the center of the world, and that honesty meant saying what I thought and always being direct.

Being in Europe had helped me unlearn some of what I'd been taught or unconsciously believed.

There may be an art to conversation, and some are better at it than others, but conversation's virtue lies in randomness and possibility: people, without a plan, could speak a spontaneous, unexpected truth, because revelation rules. Telling words recur in this smart, generous conversation between Stephen Andrews and Gregg Bordowitz: patience, responsibility, feminism, ethics, cosmology, AIDS, gift, freedom, mortality.

I think political situations usually work their way into my writing, but not necessarily in an explicit way. The environment is so chaotic now. There is someone so entirely unreliable in charge, and reliable only in the fact that Thing - I don't say his name - is a pathological narcissist. He's going to do whatever he can to defend himself and whatever will make him look good. That's what matters to him.

Kafka wrote the great line: "my education has damaged me in ways I do not even know." And that's always been a signature motto for me.

Do the obvious, you won't forget it. Do the obvious, you won't regret it. Obvious, obvious, obvious.

A book coming out into the world can be a harsh, harsh time. And your feelings are on the line. Everything that publication is about is really not what your writing is about. Your writing is coming out of something else, and publication and being in the public are something else. And those of us who have published, in whatever way we're published, are very fortunate.