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.

There is no real appeal for me in an image of a woman on a motorcycle.

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

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.

There was lots of pleasure in writing The Flamethrowers. Then again, what is pleasure? Some pleasure is easy and other kinds are never quite felt, existing only as the residue of hard work, or more as satisfaction than thrill.

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

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