The material dictates the approach..

In LA, you think you're making something up, but it's making you up..

I was raised a right-wing Republican and was about eighteen when I had to admit to myself that in regards to the great domestic crucible of the day, ….

Half the country seceded from the other half when Abraham Lincoln was elected because half the country couldn't abide his position on slavery. You wo….

There have been times I thought that when I got a certain point in the story, a certain character was going to do a certain thing, only to get to tha….

I think for the foreseeable future we have to disabuse ourselves of any ideas of unifying, or coming together, or all getting along. I don't think we….

One of the basic philosophical tenets of conservatism - which says that the more power devolves from the federal government to the states, the greate….

It became inescapable that as conservatives were wrong about people of color, they were also wrong about women. They were wrong about gay people. The….

When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with ….

I have members of my immediate family, and my wife's immediate family, who voted for Donald Trump, and now there's this gulf that I have no interest ….

a dream is only a memory of the future.

It wouldn't have occurred to me that while this old white man, which is to say me, was voting for Hillary Clinton, white women were choosing an overt….

By the late 70s conservatism was becoming more corporate on the one hand, more theocratic on the other. In reaction to the 60s, conservatism was more….

Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and a more vague sense of where things may w….

Is the humanism intuitive or labored over?, the answer is: Yes. It begins intuitively, it becomes the reason for writing the thing, and then it's to ….

In terms of America, I think any profound consideration is bound to return us to the notion of twins because, though you certainly can contend there ….

If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation..

I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of some….

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake..

Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance..

To the extent that I've ever understood postmodernism - and I'm sure there are people out there who do, but I'm not one of them - one of its distingu….