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

I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics.

I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.

I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I'm interested in what they say and how they say it.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character. Then again, there is a huge gap between me as a person and what I do in the novel.

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.

I think any time you deal with humans and the way they exploit one another and cause pain you are in the realm of politics, on some level.