I think people got in touch with me either knowing my work, or probably more frequently just knowing a plot or sort of buzz about something I did and sort of saying, "Get that guy that writes the crazy stuff in here."

I can tell from about 20 yards away when someone has a manuscript for me. I can just tell - they have that look.

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

I dont walk around chuckling all the time. My outlook is very bleak. Its worse than bleak, its apocalyptic.

I always thought of my work as being animated by a spirit of unhinged generosity.

I thought of myself as kind of an anarchist all my whole adult life, from the days when I was 15 or 16.

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.