I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.
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 don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.
Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.
I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.
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.
The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.
It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.
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.
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.
In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.
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.
I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow, I keep myself sane.
I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.
I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
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 had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
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.
