The kids I knew growing up who worked on bikes all loved the smell of gas. It is the liquid agent for speed.

Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.

In short, I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that there's a real and true and authentic world, and then a bunch of false ones.

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.

There is no real appeal for me in an image of a woman on a motorcycle.

I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.

I guess I still feel that way and yet I'm slightly hesitant to insist on that idea, that it "better be fun for the writer." Or rather, that if it is, then the pleasure is a sign that it's good. Maybe I feel I've read that somewhere, other writers saying it, and I just think there is possibly no formula, and I don't like to read an interview with a writer where they just lay out the doxa of what quality is. It can seem brittle to do that.