Artists are political in the sense that they’ve subtracted themselves from the structure of the marketplace and are contributing something that’s not utilitarian. Even though books get sold, and I get advances, I get to look at society and think for a living.

I’d say it’s okay to be political and to be a writer. Those streams can be separate, and they can be connected; for me, they’re both. Life is political, and I’m interested in my community and in a lot of issues – some of them American, some global.

It’s through engagement with the world, and not separation from it, that something with meaning gets produced.

I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.

I don’t like the info-dump, as it’s known.

Writing is a way of living. It doesn’t quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It’s a way of being alive for the writer.

I’m not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

I’m very interested in the idea of a large group of people who come together quite suddenly, but not illogically, for reasons that could not have been anticipated.

I suppose I am interested in women plus anonymity plus disappearance.

Eventually, I decided that if I was going to really write a novel, I couldn’t do it in New York City while holding down a job. You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you‘re independently wealthy, which I’m not.

My parents were hippies.

Art is like a stock with a decent return for people in finance, and they get to feel like they are involved with culture, spend time with artists, as part of their dividend.

I didn’t do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor.

In fiction, there happens to be a long history of creative engagement with marginality, with the very human components of society that others don’t want to think about, from writers such as Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to Genet and Sarrazin and right on up to Norman Mailer.

Futurism eventually got marred by its link to Fascism, but early on, it was totally avant-garde, and I wanted to dream a phantom link from the early futurists to the politically radical Italy of the 1970s, a time of fun, play, subversion – if also violence and mayhem.

I knew that I wanted to write about a very young woman because I wanted to see the eyes of the art world in a fresh or even slightly naive way. Because there’s something very honest about entering a room and not having a read on everyone there.

I usually get up between 7 A.M. and 8 A.M., have coffee, and go right to work. It’s really important not to get sidetracked in the morning so I’m still in that dreamy state for my writing.

I am not a sun person at all. I think it’s a cancerous poison and I don’t want it touching me.

I don’t have any outside view of myself, and if I did, I would probably be creatively inhibited. I just write in the way that I write.

Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor‘s-new-clothes sort of way. I think that’s not right and that it’s just because they don’t understand the discourse.

I write the novels that are possible for me to write, not that ones I think will come across in a certain light.

Painting was a problem – you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool.

Some writers think that fiction is the space of great neutrality where all humans share the same concerns, and we are all alike. I don’t think so. I’m interested in class warfare because I think it’s real.

A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political.

If a writer is always trying to keep a narrator emitting a tone of complete knowingness, it can become false.

The great thing about writing is that it has to work without that invisible layer of the reader‘s added knowledge.

The social dimension of the art world is fascinating to me, but I also want to entertain the reader, so I will let a character say something funny.

I have crashed on a motorcycle that was going at 140mph, so I know what it feels like.

Art is something special because it can come up with a way of approaching the truth that is a little to the side.

My neighbors think I do nothing because I don’t go to a job, which is fine and good.

I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

It’s a cliche, and in a way it’s a conservative idea about fiction, but I did learn the hard way that plot does need to dictate the story.

These women were taking over these former manufacturing warehouses in SoHo and figuring out a way to be fashionable and viable without money. It’s hard to imagine a life like that in Manhattan now – there’s something romantic about it.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That’s how life is.

I don’t regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.

It’s amazing how life conspires to set you up with what you need.

I don’t believe in the model of pure inspiration. All of my creative work stems from a dialogue with others.

People who want their love easy don’t really want love.

I don’t start with a list of historical scenes that I want to include in the book. At a certain point, the narrative totally takes over, and everything that I include I can only incorporate if it answers to the internal terms of the novel.

Like most writers, I’ve read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly.

I’m drawn in some strangely natural way to immersing myself in a milieu whose rules I don’t understand, where there are things you can’t access simply by being intelligent or doing well in school.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

Telluride has an incredible history and reputation, and I’ve long known of it as a unique entity that makes a place for writers – one more aspect of this exceptional film festival in the Colorado Alps.

‘Blood Meridian’ was without question the novel that made me want to become a writer.

I’m not the kind of person who would want to go into a studio and manage other people and listen to the phone ringing. That’s alien to me.

Danny Lyon is one of my favorite photographers.

I’m hesitant to ever take on the crest of the veteran. So I don’t know who I am to warn the younger writer about the perils to come. I think maybe the most dangerous influence is to think you have all the answers and should be giving counsel.

I don’t read for plot, a story ‘about’ this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth rendered into the language, something happening.

I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.

I love the novels of Didion and Bret Ellis and consider them L.A. writers because they write about L.A.

I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as ‘sweeping,’_ ‘tender‘ or ‘universal.’ But to the real question of what’s inside: I avoid books that seem to conservatively follow stale formulas. I don’t read for plot, a story ‘about’ this or that.

I try to show ugliness, but with compassion for the people who commit ugly acts.

Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on.

At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I’m a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free. Books go a little wavy, but they’re mine, so who cares.

I have never liked the ‘Been there done that’ thing… You hear that all the time from people, and I think it’s just based on pure insecurity… Each person is going to have their own unique take on something.

I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men like to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn’t say much, I listened.

For me, art is not ‘brooding.’ It comes from someplace that is more fun and that has a kind of electricity to it.

Publishing is not my world.

I don’t really see art as structured by logic.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

I had a Stuart Davis poster growing up.

I don’t think of myself as a gearhead or a motorcyclist. I’m not that young, and this is like another life of mine. But the people I know from that era think of me that way.

People are complicated. Personally I don’t go in for puritanical people.

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I’m interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.

I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don’t identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the West, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles.

Violence, factory politics – these things simply form some bedrock of what interests me, but I’m a child of the twentieth century. And I don’t see reality and its violence, wars, oppression, etc., and fiction as counterposed.

I have to arrange my life very carefully. I need eight hours‘ sleep to work.

A novel is not a rant.

Growing up, I was not told that there were women’s areas of preoccupation or male ones.

I spent ten years riding motorcycles.

To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That’s how you learn something.

I think sometimes writers can get themselves into trouble trying to exert a totally controlled and super-knowing tone. This kind of knowingness is not the most promising tone to be sustained throughout a novel, to have a young woman who understands everybody and is always reading a room perfectly.

I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn’t get easier. That may be the case, and I’ve only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt.

I am not fond of lengthy descriptions of phony artworks.

My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself.

I know a little bit about motorcycles and motorcycle riding.

Art breathes into life a surplus that is both vital and extraordinary.

A historical event represents the best and the worst of that moment.

I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I’m interested in what they say and how they say it.

I guess I’m not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.

I don’t really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn’t object if someone thought it was mine, but I don’t claim to have written that – I just wrote my book.

Tone is somewhat totalising in that, once I locate it, it tells me what kind of syntax to use, what word choices to make, how much white space to leave on the page, what sentence length, what the rhythmic patterning will be. If I can’t find the tone, I sometimes try narrating through the point of view of someone else.

The art world is filled with vibrancy.

Success is a completely abstract thing – it has no bearing on daily life, family matters, the matter of artistic creation, but it can affect grace, and if I lose that, I really have gained nothing from success.

I like Baudelaire’s sentences quite a lot. I read and re-read him very often.

Artists complain about the art world until it starts rubbing their back, then they have their love affair with it.

From ‘Midnight Cowboy‘ to ‘Taxi Driver‘ is a brief era whose grit, beauty, and violence has been quite mythologized.

I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?

At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I’m a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free. Books go a little wavy, but they’re mine, so who cares.

Flamethrowers have been used by many armies in many wars, including by American Marines in Korea and Vietnam. They cause horrific deaths and are thus a serious public-relations liability. The U.S. military apparently phased them out in 1978.