I think art is much more about an engagement with the world, a way of being called upon and recognizing that the world is speaking to you. Which isn't quite solitude, even if you're alone when it happens.

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

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.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.

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