Jay-Z isn't actually any better than James Joyce even though more people understand him. I'm more interested in what's meaningful within the lives of individuals. And fiction will always be central to the lives of certain people, which is all that matters.

I think it's what fiction is for: to illuminate that gap between our secret selves and our more visible and apparent ones.

We're a culture that's obsessed with people who make and who squander ridiculous amounts of wealth, which seemed an obsession well worth interrogating in a novel. That probably accounts for what some have called the book's "sweeping" feel, but I don't know that I set out to be cinematic. I wouldn't know how to do that in a novel, specifically.

My own sense is that fiction is inching its way over to join poetry on the cultural margin. It's an area of passionate concern for me, as for many people, but it's nowhere near as central to the culture as it used to be.

During the 90s, I watched a lot of people getting fat and prosperous, and I thought, culture itself is the casualty of this.

It's hard to imagine there's a place for great writing inside a multinational conglomerate.

Sometimes it seems to me that the celebration of a person is really just a prelude to ridicule.