I do study Marcel Proust, for multiple technical virtuosities but also his swerve, as you say, between characters and in scenes. Certain films can help for that, too, in terms of understanding how multiple conversations at a table, or in a room, can take place and remain separate, and dissonant, and also gather themselves, accidentally, into a collective rhythm and an affect.

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

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

Writing is a way of living. It doesn't quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It's a way of being alive, for the writer.

I do not consciously reclaim. I am not those "some readers" and so I think it would be impossible for me to see my work that way, as reclaiming a preserve. I write in a way that is aimed at all levels - conscious and unconscious - at pleasing the kind of reader I am. Some of the authors I read are male, some are female, and some are even in between. And speaking of in between, maybe now is as good a moment as any to point out that there might be no "feminine" or "masculine" literary sensibility, or sensibility generally.

The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it’s worthy of respect. It’s not admirable to want love, it just is.

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.