What I saw quite clearly in the '80s, before the internet, was that the whole world was shifting toward digital formats, and that didn't matter whether it's movies or writing or whatever. It was something that was coming. And with the invention of the World Wide Web in the early '90s, when we were teaching our first courses, or the arrival of the internet by way of the browser, which opened up the internet to everybody - soon it was just revolutionary.

I see no reason to stop writing. But the reason isn't always one of your own. The mind is not invulnerable, and it can lose some of its powers.

We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.

People, fearing their own extinction, are willing to accept and perpetuate hand-me-down answers to the meaning of life and death; and, fearing a weakening of the tribal structures that sustain them, reinforce with their tales the conventional notions of justice, freedom, law and order, nature, family, etc. The writer, lone rider, has the power, if not always the skills, wisdom, or desire, to disturb this false contentment.

Metafiction says something. It has to do with taking a large fiction itself and writing within it; that kind of self-reflecting writing that emerges from it can be thought of as metafictional.

What I saw quite clearly in the '80s, before the internet, was that the whole world was shifting toward digital formats, and that didn't matter whether it's movies or writing or whatever. It was something that was coming. And with the invention of the World Wide Web in the early '90s, when we were teaching our first courses, or the arrival of the internet by way of the browser, which opened up the internet to everybody - soon it was just revolutionary.

The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it.