At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I’m a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free. Books go a little wavy, but they’re mine, so who cares.

Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think.

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

I'm releasing myself from the responsibility of claiming to know when something is good and when it isn't.

Violence, factory politics - these things simply form some bedrock of what interests me, but I'm a child of the twentieth century. And I don't see reality and its violence, wars, oppression, etc., and fiction as counterposed.

Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.