My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending….

I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly ….

The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel..

I don't think it's always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their m….

I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only meas….

Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California..

Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array….

When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his….

I remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and….

Maybe that's the way I'm private - I respect the privacy of "my" characters? Anyway, we're getting close to the whole "relatability" and "likability"….

I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it h….

I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it's imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always….

I'm aware of narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative and then those stories - not the experienc….

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

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

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

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..

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….

The scare quotes burn off like fog..

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 ….

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….