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'm a staunch civil libertarian; I really believe that the individual is more important than any societal value.

I think of myself as a jazz player, and my music as a natural extension of the jazz tradition. What I'm doing is completely free improvisation ('composing in real time') with nothing predetermined. I've had a lot of experience playing many different kinds of music and several different instruments, and since I tend not to waste anything, it all shows up somewhere in the music I'm playing now.

You want sanity, democracy, community, an intact Earth? We can't get there, obeying Constitutional theory and law crafted by slave masters, imperialists, corporate masters, and Nature destroyers. We can't get there, kneeling before robed lawyers stockpiling class plunder precedent up their venerable sleeves. So isn't disobedience the challenge of our age? Principled, inventive, escalating disobedience to liberate our souls, to transfigure our work as humans on this Earth.

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

I think that life is incredibly violent and that individual people are incredibly violent on one level or another. I don't try to change life to suit my writing; in a certain way I'm a naturalist of the nineteenth century school.