With a few exceptions like Kraftwerk, most great 20th century Western music is in some way American-based. And the great paradox of America, the paradox that distills America, is that this greatest of American contributions to humanity, this American contribution that probably has influenced more people around the world for the good, that probably has brought more people around the world unqualified joy, was born of America's greatest evil, slavery. Or one of the two great evils anyway, counting the European extinction of those who were on the continent first.

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.

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

Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."

When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

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