There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.

It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.

Those beliefs about the essential goodness or beauty of the world are fundamentally paper-thin bullshit. There's not an essential belief that isn't a contingent belief. It could all be destroyed in a second, at any second. And I have an issue with that.

I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.

It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.

Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical [...]

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.