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.

I don't even know - for me, it's difficult to decide which is more important - the things or the thoughts. It seems to me that certain things came up more or less naturally.

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.

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?

We can speak of politics, ethics, and in this way, speak about the world. But at the same time, it's always in a way that is totally nebulous and abstracted, this way of thinking about reality. And that's why I write the way I do - it's an almost immortal way to show dependence on the biological, the political, the moral parts of us. I say immortal because we now have to find new formats, new eloquences, and resolve within ourselves this "constructed" life, a life that is incomplete, imperfect.

Nostalgia for people, cultures, everything. There's an ability to use these marks to note things that are erased, deleted. Traces are a species of history, of evidence. It's a way for the way the narrator to construct a semblance of self, even though all of this creates a deception, a way to think of one's traces as a real way to define oneself. The trace is fallible, impermanent. It's one of the motives I had in mind throughout the text.

I find that, for me, it is this concept of borrowed or built life, life on loan, that gets me writing. It's similar to speaking about literature. I like it, and then I don't like it. It has such an inherent vein of pretention, because you're not speaking about real things. There's a literary pretentiousness made of speaking and spending so much time on unreal persons. And it seems, now, impossible to create an unpretentious, totally organic character.