I Hate That Word Dysfunction.

The Reader Is A Friend, Not An Adversary, Not A Spectator.

The Mekons Were Kind Of Like The Background Music Of My Life.

Fiction That Isn't An Author's Personal Adventure Into The Frightening Or The Unknown Isn't Worth Writing For Anything But Money.

When I Finally Gave Up Any Hope Of Doing Anything Representative Of The American Family, I Actually Seemed To Have Tapped Into Other People's Weirdness In That Way.

If You Read The Biographies Of People Who Have Written Good Books, You Often See The Point Where They Suddenly Come Into Themselves, And Those Weeks In The Spring Of 1997 Were When I Came Into Myself As A Writer. They Feel Like Some Of The Best Weeks Of Writing I’ll Ever Have. The Discovery That I Could Write Better About Something As Trivial As An Ordinary Family Dinner Than I Could About The Exploding Prison Population Of The United States, And The Corporatization Of American Life, And All The Other Things I’d Been Trying To Do, Was A Real Revelation.