I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.

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.

I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.

In my early twenties the nature of conservatism itself changed. When I identified as a fourteen-year-old conservative, it was closer to what we today think of as libertarianism - conservatism, at least for me, had been defined by Jeffersonian credos like "the best governed are the least governed" and "I have sworn eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" that were very idealistic and romantic to a kid.

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.

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.

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."