I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.

In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.

My father thought a novel was a broken short story. There's something to that. Many of my favorite novels are novellas. The authors of brief things must reckon with the precision of language.

Wait," I say. "I think you're mistaken. Saying there is no dream is the same as saying everything is a dream. Isn't it? Everyone's a dreamer? Extraordinary things happen all the time even when we're awake. What I meant to suggest to you, if indeed that was me in your dream doing the suggesting, is that there is only one world. This one. The dream is real. The ordinary is the wonderful. The wonderful is the ordinary.

John Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is very important to me as an influence. When I didn't know how to start Mr. Splitfoot, I just wrote the first line of As I Lay Dying instead and then continued on. It's dissolved in the text now, but it helped me start.

I became a writer because I am the youngest of six children. I listen; I observe. I'm camouflaged as a moth. Mothers are unseen. It helps me write.

One book that has meant much to my writing is W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants. He uses a photograph of Vladimir Nabokov hunting butterflies in a similar way. The image or a reference to the image is traced throughout the four separate narratives. It sometimes seems to be the only link between the pieces, while the symbol Nabokov cuts remains wide open, a pencil sketch, a mystery to interpret outside his role as emigrant/observer.