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

I've always been entranced with theater.

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.

As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles of narrative don't conform to my style of experiencing the world.

I think to simply make fun of something isn't particularly interesting. I try to not just do a parody of something or belittle something or disparage something.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

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