I guess I still feel that way and yet I'm slightly hesitant to insist on that idea, that it "better be fun for the writer." Or rather, that if it is, then the pleasure is a sign that it's good. Maybe I feel I've read that somewhere, other writers saying it, and I just think there is possibly no formula, and I don't like to read an interview with a writer where they just lay out the doxa of what quality is. It can seem brittle to do that.

I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.

I'm a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I'm happy that way.

Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.

Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think.

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.

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.