Sometimes I think my purpose is as a saboteur when I'm working with other people, derailing what they're trying to do or taking things to a ludicrous extremity.

My idea with my work is always to fashion something that's impossible to transpose into any other media.

When I started, I wanted to be thought of as tortured and seductive, not funny, but humor tends to be a reflexive part of a person's sensibility. It's an almost impossible thing to teach anyone, which leads me to believe that it's intuitive.

In me, speaking psychologically, there is always an ongoing struggle between my enormously self-regarding, almost delusionally aspirational, Napoleonic personality and a marginalized one.

I'm in that very preliminary stage of wondering how exactly to "pressurize" the novel in some way I've never considered before.

It's in great joy that we grasp truth.

I have an enduring, very robust infatuation with dictators. I have an infatuation with Stalin, Mao, and Mussolini. In the Paris Review interview I did (in 2013), I said my next book, this one, was going to be about Mussolini. I wound up only having a Mussolini cameo in the book.