I'm too ambitious to give another man credit, even if that other man is only myself in disguise.

My fictional worlds were those of a fabulist, of an intellectual fantasist. I was the lawgiver, and the countries and inhabitants of my imagination were answerable to me. If I wished for a man to levitate; to enter another's story by rowboat or by intoning a sentence or by performing a shadow-puppet play; if I wanted him to become a swarm of intelligent elementary particles and enter the Internet and travel into the past and far into the future, it was so.

Because of an instability at my own core, it comforts me to live, fixed, within a story. If reading is our consolation for having been allotted only one life, I find that writing oneself into a fictional world is even more comforting.

The persona in my stories may be truer to my "real" self than any alleged objective, factual "I" that I could replicate for the purposes of storytelling.

I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.

I admitted that I did not understand life. What I meant was that I am bewildered by human hearts and motivations, including my own.

It may be old hat, but I see no reason to close off what is for me a fruitful subject of inquiry, especially so for one, like me, who is very much interested in creating stories and novels of ideas.