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.

The material dictates the approach. I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them. Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."

I have members of my immediate family, and my wife's immediate family, who voted for Donald Trump, and now there's this gulf that I have no interest in bridging however much I love those people. It's almost like the Civil War.

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.

The form is always integral to the expression of the theme or to the sheer telling of the story, and sometimes the right form is apparent to me from the outset and sometimes it isn't.

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.

Western music is arguably America's greatest contribution to the 20th century, cultural or otherwise.