I think art is much more about an engagement with the world, a way of being called upon and recognizing that the world is speaking to you. Which isn'….

People who want their love easy don't really want love..

To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something..

I don't really see art as structured by logic..

I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature..

Violence, factory politics - these things simply form some bedrock of what interests me, but I'm a child of the twentieth century. And I don't see re….

My natural orientation has never been among a community of writers, really. For some reason my social world has always been in the art world..

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything t….

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ….

The kids I knew growing up who worked on bikes all loved the smell of gas. It is the liquid agent for speed..

In short, I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that there's a real and true and authentic world, and then a bunch of false ones..

There was lots of pleasure in writing The Flamethrowers. Then again, what is pleasure? Some pleasure is easy and other kinds are never quite felt, ex….

Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it..

Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none of which have the kin….

I do study Marcel Proust, for multiple technical virtuosities but also his swerve, as you say, between characters and in scenes. Certain films can he….

I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experie….

I didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started wo….

My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself..

Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think..

People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with..

I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I'm interested in what they say and how they say it..