If You Ask Me, When

We're Surrounded By Mandates, And I Believe That Literature Should Be Mandate-free. I Feel Very Strongly About That.

I Think The Most Interesting Parts Of Human Experience Might Be The Sparks That Come From That Sort Of Chipping Flint Of Cultures Rubbing Against Each Other.

There's A Graveyard In Northern France Where All The Dead Boys From D-day Are Buried. The White Crosses Reach From One Horizon To The Other. I Remember Looking It Over And Thinking It Was A Forest Of Graves. But The Rows Were Like This, Dizzying, Diagonal, Perfectly Straight, So After All It Wasn't A Forest But An Orchard Of Graves. Nothing To Do With Nature, Unless You Count Human Nature.

He Lifts Her Breasts, Which Fit Perfectly Into His Hands, Though He Knows This Is No Promise That He Gets To Keep Them. A Million Things You Can't Have Will Fit In A Human Hand.

If My Setting Is New To A Reader, Or The Concerns Of The Novel Are New, I Hope They Will Learn Something About The World. I Would Like To Say That They Can Trust That What They Do Learn In The Novel Will Be Accurate, Because I Pay A Lot Of Attention To Facts. I Do A Lot Of Research To Make Sure That I'm Not Giving Them, You Know, Blue Moons Of Jupiter. It's Not Science Fiction.