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.

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.

People who want their love easy don't really want love.

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

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 don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.

My natural orientation has never been among a community of writers, really. For some reason my social world has always been in the art world.