Violence, factory politics - these things simply form some bedrock of what interests me, but I'm a child of the twentieth century. And I don't see reality and its violence, wars, oppression, etc., and fiction as counterposed.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

I didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor.

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

I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.

The VW doesn’t make you think of Hitler and genocide. It’s a breast on wheels, a puffy little dream.

As to the "traditional filler of twenty-first century realist fiction," maybe that is something I avoid. I don't relate to standard psychologizing in novels. I don't really believe that the backstory is the story you need. And I don't believe it's more like life to get it - the buildup of "character" through psychological and family history, the whole idea of "knowing what the character wants." People in real life so often do not know what they want. People trick themselves, lie to themselves, fool themselves. It's called survival, and self-mythology.