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

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake, and if anything I've always steered a bit clear of that kind of thing, because it seems gimmicky to play around with text rather than do the work of telling a story and creating characters.

If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.

There are millions of white Americans today who still can barely bring themselves to acknowledge that the Civil War, with its twin Americas locked in a death match, was about slavery. They'll argue it was about economics, and they're right only because one of those economies was a slave economy. They'll argue it was about culture, and they're right only because one of those cultures was a slave culture.

For better or worse I'm the writer I am today because of hearing those Dylan records. For better and most certainly not for worse, I'm the person I am today because of hearing Charles.

Strip away the morphing landscapes and rips in the space-time continuum, and my stories are about things that novels have always been about: love and sex and identity and memory and history and redemption.

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.