Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance.

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.

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

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.

Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance.

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

I think for the foreseeable future we have to disabuse ourselves of any ideas of unifying, or coming together, or all getting along. I don't think we're going to reconcile the America that elected the first African American president with the America that just elected a president avidly endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan - I'm not sure I even want to reconcile the two.