When all of the prescribed actions are over, now how do you behave? There is no prescription for two weeks after the funeral, or five weeks after the funeral.
“Things that have happened are tangibly still happening, whether we know it, accept it, or not.”
Excellent fiction is not another escape or distraction from the truth but it shines light on it and it allows the reader to wrangle it. This is fiction’s invaluable importance.
“The patterns are the problem, right? In literature you can disrupt the patterns, and offer new ones.”
“The problem with being coherent is that then you can be marketed to.”
I don’t worry whether or not my writing is innovative or experimental. I only want to be on that bookshelf, the one that’s off limits, that requires special permission to access, that has to be found and sought after from a queer distance.
To me, that’s very queer — to write a chracater who you’re very thirsty for but who would have no interest in you.
I’ve cultivated a kind of heat in my process both in order to short circuit my critical faculties, so I can more readily be surprised, and also to outrun my self-doubt.
I prefer the French term ‘chercheur,’ or straight-up ‘researcher’ because it has a kind of Sufi ring to it. You know, the idea of being on a never-ending path towards knowledge, ignorance being the perpetual state of the present.
“Fiction can give meaning to the world and fiction can make sense of the world, but then, because it is fiction after all, it also makes a good case for questioning whether anything is for anything.”