Not explicitly, no. Compared to this enormous, relentless evolutionary activity in the built environment, writing is small potatoes.

Yes, there's a relaying of internal states that only a novel can achieve. In my view, the novel is one of Europe's greatest gifts to the world. America and Africa collaborated to give the world jazz. We'll call it even.

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.

I schooled in the Boston area.

It takes a few years to understand what we've lived through. At the moment, we're still sort of mired in the irrelevant bullshit. There isn't yet that public conversation about 9/11.

To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.

I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully.