The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself..

I don't beat at the details, but I do always keep in mind that anything that isn't A) moving the story forward or B) enlarging my understanding of th….

I have written screenplays. Most recently for Errol Morris, who was thinking about doing his first fiction movie, and with a young director who wante….

I think fiction is all about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Part of what I do is let the stuff I read about meld with what I have experi….

What makes us threaten the things we want most?.

I do find stories - or literary fiction - an apt form for analyzing the world. And especially for trying to imagine the other. An agenda, again, that….

I'll find something in what I read that snags my imagination in emotional terms; it resonates with me for reasons more complicated than just that it ….

I feel like one of the things I'm trying most to do is stretch my empathetic reach, as far as it will go. I got as far as Gilles de Rais' assistant, ….

I think there's no question that historians create; they would tell you that, I think. If I'm trying to imagine an imperial Roman position, it's much….

I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours ….

Class is the most taboo subject in America. The American media would rather talk about race or perversion or anything else considered taboo before cl….

Oh, I usually don't know a whole lot about a subject when I begin; the process itself teaches me a lot as I go along. Usually I know enough about one….

It turns out that our intuition is a greater genius than we are..

I'm tempted to do everything. And sometimes I think, "Oh, come on. You can stick that detail somewhere.".

Disasters occur organically in my work, in that that's the way my thinking tends, more than that's what I start out by planning. I'm sort of a catast….

The protagonist of Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours doesn’t make it easy for us, channeling as he does Barry Hannah and Denis Johnson by way ….

Does research get in the way of the story? It certainly can. Anything can, given that as writers we're all geniuses at procrastination. But mostly re….

I don't think conservativism is about a deficiency. I think it's about a commitment to an ideology that has to in some ways devalue the usefulness of….

I very much like people. I don't much like writers who don't..

Empathy is a human trait. But lots of humans exercise some traits more energetically than others. By "the usefulness of empathy" I mean the way in wh….

I think there's a playfulness and a distance to Kavalier and Clay that I don't aspire to in my stuff. Maybe I'm more old-fashioned, and less of a fab….