When I First Wanted To Be A

I Wanted My First Novel To Be A Veritable Infarct Of Narrative Cloggers-the Trick Being To Feel Your Way Through Each Clog By Blowing It Up Until Its Obstructiveness Finally Reveals Not Blank Mass But Unlooked-for Seepage Points Of Passage.

I'm Often Called Obsessive, But I Don't Think I Am Any More Than Anyone Else.

There's Something Paralyzing About Being A Writer That You Have To Escape. I Don't Want To Think Of Myself As A Guy Who's Written A Bunch Of Books. The 26 Letters Distance Us From Our Own Hesitations And They Make Us Sound As If We Know What We're Doing. We Know Grammar, We Know Prose, But Actually We're All Just Struggling In The Dark, Really.

I'm Suspicious Of Full-replacement Programs - That Is, Pronouncements That One Way Of Doing Something Will Entirely Supplant Another, And That In Fact We Have To Hurry The Replacement Along.

The Function Of A Great Library Is To Store Obscure Books.