There are sociologists and anthropologists who can do a great job of describing Italy. They have data, theories, studies, statistics. But a writer arrives at it through language and describes the society that is emerging through language.
Exorcism is just a lie we tell ourselves in order to survive.
In the novel, I built up the plot about halfway, and let the characters take over from there; I just watched what they did, and sometimes they did awful, gory things.
There’s often a sort of mysticism about war, wherein war is supposed to be a kind of ineffable experience that forever separates the veteran from the civilian in ways that cannot be expressed. I’m very wary of those sorts of claims.
The way I see it, the only truth a fiction writer is bound by is an emotional one.
You can’t say that this object is a world with crisis and this object is a world without crisis. Empirically we can’t do that; it’s a logical distinction, we can only have crisis and anti-crisis.
Today, not only is the personal political, the personal is celebrity.
I need to believe in the artistic validity of the misshapen, or there won’t be a lot of room for me as a writer.
You don’t have to know how you swing the bat, you just have to do it. Later on, you have to step back and pretend you know what the fuck you’re doing and that you have a theory about it.
I don’t consider hopefulness to be a naïve thing or just for the young and the idealistic. The people I respect the most are people that have survived some stuff and they have this hope — that is what they have found.