If people are jumping down people's throats all the time, in the end, they'll just shrivel up like a flower shrivels up that's not watered.
Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.
I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.
I'm increasingly on the side of thinkers like David Graeber who are talking back to this notion of totality and emphasizing how there are all kinds of moments in our daily lives that break - or at least could break - from the logic of profit and the modes of domination it entails. Zones of freedom, even if it's never pure.
I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.
Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity.
My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.
There are no safe choices. Only other choices.
It makes sense that that's part of the story and everything, but that's part of any story of any record - where was it record and how long and what were the people doing. I think people want to know where these events are made. That's why I like the word "record. "
I’ve never thought of Playboy, quite frankly, as a sex magazine. I always thought of it as a lifestyle magazine in which sex was one important ingredient.
That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.