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.

I was a child but weirdly uninhibited. I talked to people and inserted myself in all kinds of absurd situations. I think some of those life experiences influenced me in terms of the main character of The Flamethrowers. But for the parts where the community of artists are speaking above her level of participation, that probably came more out of my experience of being in New York in the '90s as an adult.

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

Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none of which have the kind of directly causal reasoning you cite.

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.

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.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.