I schooled in the Boston area.

Echo is very important to me. I love the repetition of motifs, or the slight alteration of what's been said before. This is part of how one creates a mood, a psychological caul, in fact, around the reader.

I adore imaginary monsters, but I am terrified of real ones.

So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn't use a smartphone, and he doesn't discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail.

You know that this vignette and that vignette belong side by side, you know that a certain turn of phrase you've been saving will probably work best within a given section of the narrative. As in a jazz performance, writing lives or dies by what's produced in that moment. But that moment is attended by long preparation.

The creative part of oneself finds its way out. In this case, I got interested particularly in the medium of Twitter and looked for ways to use it creatively.

Killing a bunch of people in Sudan and Yemen and Pakistan, it's like, "Who cares - we don't know them." But the current discussion is framed as "When can the President kill an American citizen?" Now in my mind, killing a non-American citizen without due process is just as criminal as killing an American citizen without due process - but whatever gets us to the table to discuss this thing, we're going to take it.