I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction – by skipping the parts that bored me.

I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I’m part of the human world.

I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.

In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.

Nerds are just deep, and neurotic, fans. Needy fans. We’re all nerds, on one subject or another.

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.

I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

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.

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

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.

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.

I can’t bear the silent ringing in my skull.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction – by skipping the parts that bored me.

It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

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 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 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’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 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 good while it was good.

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.

I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.

I don’t paint anymore. I haven’t since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously.

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.

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.