Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing.

The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.

I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours.

Life's too short for anxious score-keeping

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

The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.

The novelist can't successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of doing this; the mode I prefer is indirect.