 Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit. |
| I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture. |
| I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me. |
| I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space. |
| I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction. |
| Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature and my love of film. |
| The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory. |
| In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love. |
| I've never related to the work geek at all-it sounds much more horrible than nerd. Like a freak biting a chicken's head off in a sideshow. |
| The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white. |
| I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example. |
| It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want. |
| I'd excluded New York from my writing, and then I came back and I fell in love with it all over again. The energy comes from an absence, that yearning for New York when you are not there. |
| I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull. |
| When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed. |
| It was good while it was good. |
| I just noticed recently that in one book after another I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically simply, is allowed to talk crazy. |
| Discomfort is very much part of my master plan. |
| My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work. |
| What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark. |
