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 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.

My books are not about different components that fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, it's about creating the space around the components, which is almost as important as the components themselves. And that space changes and blends depending upon what the components are.

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 have a strong spiritual commitment, and I try to express that in my work. Salvation cannot be worked out in human terms. The point of my writing is to touch upon the systematics of prayer and on how we arrive at a method of achieving spiritual coherence in our lives.

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.

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.