 Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem. |
| I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth. |
| I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order. |
| I'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable. |
| It's also true, however, that having conquered the regional writer ghetto, I am now intent on conquering the nationalist writer ghetto and moving out into the world more. |
| All the stuff that I used to treat with contempt - you know, I'm an artist, man, I don't do that family stuff - has begun to seem really important. |
| This is odd, but there are certain things that are really embarrassing to talk about - one is my job and the success that I've had in it, and the other is money. |
| My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style. |
| Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life. |
| What genre it falls under is only of interest later. |
| I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way. |
| So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions. |
| It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be. |
| I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity. |
| My grandfather was a newspaper publisher and his paper had all the comics in NYC, so some of my earliest memories are of reading the family paper and heading straight for the comics insert. |
| I love comic books and always did as a kid. |
| But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now. |
| The Ice Storm, because of the movie, has had, or is to have, a vigorous life in other cultures. |
| Writing the book was itself a process of concealing and revealing. |
| The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality. |
