I think first-person narrators should be complex, because otherwise the first-person is too shallow and predictable. I like a first-person narrator who can't totally be trusted.

Capitalism, in the realm of sexuality, I figure, thinks that we behave in specific ways, like a breast is always going to produce a hard-on for some product, whereas the truth is that sexuality is always a continuum, which can be characterized by reversals.

It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.

My suspicion is that this is an unavoidable human dilemma, that people will always want to avoid pain, to avoid those who are in pain, and so will be vulnerable to anyone or anything that seems to promise permanent avoidance.

I suppose that the sympathetic/unsympathetic debate about characters sometimes feels to me like a misstatement of purpose. I always think of truly complex characters are falling between the cracks in that debate.

I am excited by... the new novel by Samantha Hunt. She's a writer I really admire a lot.

So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.