I am not a sun person at all. I think it's a cancerous poison and I don't want it touching me.

And here I arrive at my point. The point is that everyone has a different dream. The point is that it is a grave mistake to assume your dream is in any way shared, that it’s a common dream. Not only is it not shared, not common, there is no reason to assume that other people don’t find you and your dream utterly revolting.

I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?

I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics.

While it might be true that our reality would suggest that more writers would address these elemental issues of modern life - work, the marketplace, brutality, race - I'm not sure I have enough of a sense in aggregate of what the dominant novelists are doing to comment on why less do, or if less do. Maybe that's partly because I don't feel woven into any kind of fabric of contemporaries; I just read what I read, and do what I do.

I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I'm interested in what they say and how they say it.

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.