One must distance oneself from the idea of strict realism. It seems to me that real nature doesn't exist anymore, this idea of "the wild." This is why I love parks, and why I chose to use them in my work - they are beyond nature. I see nature as a resource.

One must distance oneself from the idea of strict realism. It seems to me that real nature doesn't exist anymore, this idea of "the wild." This is why I love parks, and why I chose to use them in my work - they are beyond nature. I see nature as a resource.

Not to say that the process assumes anything of "greater" or "lesser" importance, though: it's just more graphic information. Take the surrealists, for example, or a work by Cage. For me, there's a great value in doing this with literature. There's a certain form of dependence; process and product inform each other, depend on each other. I consider myself a writer who doesn't write with a style, almost. I begin with tension, with a vibe, a character.

What I find is that many times when I work with chance, with indeterminacy, I am more open to experience, less prone to a fixed process, and I think it creates a very important challenge. It creates a way of writing that is, in a way, flatter or smooth, a surface conducive to release, to movement. And in this way, the form of writing gets delightfully melded with the process of the writing.

Identity is gradual, cumulative; because there is no need for it to manifest itself, it shows itself intermittently, the way a star hints at the pulse of its being by means of its flickering light. But at what moment in this oscillation is our true self manifested? In the darkness or the twinkle?

For me parks are good when first of all, they're not impeccable, and when solitude has appropriated them in such a way that solitude itself becomes an emblem, a defining trait for walkers, sporadic at best, who in my opinion should be irrevocably lost or absorbed in thought, and a bit confused, too, as when one walks through a space that's at once alien and familiar.

For me, it's a way to find a fiction within a fiction. To find a way to uncover that blunder within the "lie," because when you look closer, every "lie" - and I say that with quotation marks - can be much more complicated. Because that is what fiction is: it's probably the least important thing in the world. It's rich, but it is put-on, it passes the time. It borrows from the world, but it does not invent it.