I think not in two or three dimensional terms but in five dimensional terms when I consider a novel. There's height, width, and depth, there's the time factor, and then there's the factor which I call the cerebral factor of the reader, the way the reader adjusts to all the other dimensions, which is the fifth dimension.

I love grand scale. One of the things that everybody mentions is that my novels are beautiful objects in the sense that the elements of the actual book are being extruded and re-contextualized.

I've been in the art world for many years. But the sad fact is that most writers are visually prepubescent. Generally speaking, the literary world is provincial when it comes to matters of art. And it always has been.

The problem with American democracy is the American corporation, which is a slave holder construct, pure and simple. It's totally invasive, and people are as tightly controlled within the walls of a corporation as they are in a totalitarian society.

If there is anything unique about my writing it is the way that I combine poetry and prose, not just on the level of having a poem here, prose there, but that it really is a true amalgam.

Salvation is an individual relationship with God. I've always considered myself to be a devotional poet, and I consider myself to be a devotional novelist.

I don't think that brutality and idealism are mutually exclusive. It's a common denominator in my work - rabid idealism.