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

Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!

My natural orientation has never been among a community of writers, really. For some reason my social world has always been in the art world.

There is no single formula for good sentence. An invisible integument that gives the sentence wholeness and musicality, sometimes. But other times, the formula is almost purely one of context. And yet other times, of sheer precision of meaning. This is a good sentence: "Just as he was settling into the warm mud of alcoholic gloom, Shrike caught his arm." "Warm mud of alcoholic gloom" is exact and right and accurate.

L.A. is a great place to write because you have a lot of space. I have a big office at home, I can leave the doors open. Flowers bloom all year. But it's unglamorous in all the right ways.

I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature.

Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.