It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.

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

I like to think each writer is doing his or her part. Feeding the lake, as Jean Rhys said. And maybe there are different lakes.

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?

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 didn't think of the narrative as making a judgment. It didn't occur to me the reader would either, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible there would be that risk.

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.