For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life 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 experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with.

I love to be alone, I find it necessary, but I don't know if that's just how I am or if it's an essential ingredient to making, to art. Certainly on a practical level it is. But on the other hand, I think it's a myth that the creative inspiration is locked up inside the person and just needs a quiet space and the right "serious" brooding moment to get released.

Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I’m as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.