I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the text….

What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of….

The problem is that if you're self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn't something lost - some kind of presence? You're distr….

I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction….

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance..

I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however fli….

I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid..

Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others..

I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic ….

I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin ….

I didn't want to write another book about fraudulence..

Maybe now if you're not an exhibitionist you're private. Or maybe it's just that for a lot of people - sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in st….

I don't think "I'm going to publish this as fiction" but I think "I'm going to tell this story to a friend" and then I start telling the story in my ….

Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a tot….

The strange thing about the apocalypse is that it's uneven. For some people, it goes one way and for others another way, so that there's always this ….

Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture's prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the ser….

The scare quotes burn off like fog..

I'm trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivia….

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost..

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestu….

Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels..