To the extent that I've ever understood postmodernism - and I'm sure there are people out there who do, but I'm not one of them - one of its distinguishing traits is the story's awareness of its own artifice, and how that awareness becomes part of the story. And if that's right, then I have no idea how I ever got lumped into postmodernism except that I believe, since I was first published, people just haven't quite known where else to put me.

In essence I'm really a very traditional writer. I subscribe to the notion that, ultimately, characters do drive everything else.

By the late 70s conservatism was becoming more corporate on the one hand, more theocratic on the other. In reaction to the 60s, conservatism was more about order than freedom, more about conformity than singularity.

Obviously cheap sentimentality isn't something any good novelist wants to traffic in, but I think it's a problem if you consider it to be the most egregious of all creative sins. I think it's a problem if you consider it the thing to be avoided at all cost. I think it's a problem of you're not willing to risk the consequences of that kind of emotionalism under any circumstances. Then you wind up in the cul-de-sac of irony.

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.

These days in particular it seems not only unavoidable but even irresponsible to not acknowledge politics in some way.

By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.