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

At a certain age just being around particular people is an event.

I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.

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

I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.

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

Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none of which have the kind of directly causal reasoning you cite.