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 begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.

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.

I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature.

A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political.

Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I’m as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!