Politics is a matter of human transaction. I consider absolutely everything political, because all fiction involves relationships between people, and relationships between people always include matters of power, of equity, of communication.
For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.
The world belongs to no one. There are very few people who fit into the world. And part of the struggle of every human life is to somehow claim a place on the planet, but it's at the forefront of the experience of the wandering race. The wandering people.
It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.
I'm constantly trying to strip away layers of perceived thought or cliche.
I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we're rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that's inside of you.
I believe that people are what happened to their grandparents.
One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.
The first story I wrote was called 'Days,' and I have very little affection for it.
Writing does change you, and of course it feels good to do things, so you could say writing is de facto therapeutic. But really, one writes to write.
I'm a bit of an expert on anger, having suffered from it all through my youth, when I was both brunt and font. It's certainly the most miserable state to be in but it's also tremendously gratifying, really - rage feels justified.
It's almost uncanny to receive a prize named in honor of Bernard Malamud. I must have been in my early teens when 'The Magic Barrel' was published and I first read it.
It's much easier to read the stories that have a lot of dialogue; of course, they flow much more easily into speech.
I find I often just fall into a stone-like sleep, right in the middle of the day, just sort of clonk. I can't work for extended periods when I'm beginning something. But if I'm at the end of something, I can work on for hours and hours and hours.
I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection.
I actually came to New York because it was very tolerant. You know, it seems preposterous, ludicrous thing to say in an interview, but I came for the anonymity particularly.
I just want to be on my own branch twittering.
We're all walking around trying to deal with a certain amount of shame, to repress it. And we restrict our mental lives to smaller and smaller areas.
I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.
I'm a very spoiled writer. I need to be indolent, to waste a lot of paper. I'm inefficient.
