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

Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.

To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.

People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with.

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.

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.

In writing novels, you have to believe in yourself or there would be no way to sustain it. But you also have to give good evidence regularly for having that faith in self-either with quality goods or with, at least, "good efforts." Working hard will do when inspiration is not forthcoming.