The avowed aim of all utopian movements is to put an end to history and to establish a final and permanent calm.
I seem always to have two or three novels going at once. It takes me a long time to finish one.
We can't write a serious novel in the 21st century without acknowledging the inescapable self-awareness we're stuck with. The idea we're surrounded by falsehoods and lies. It's hard for the thinking person to believe in narratives. And yet we want some place to invest our belief.
I just write what I want to read, and sometimes keeping it interesting means adding one more element that ends up adding another year to the work.
I love poetry, read it a lot, but make no claim to being able to write it.
The idea that language can be recombined to create new forms, new things, is of course very old in poetry.
Absurdity isn't quite so absurd as it once was.
I always enjoyed writing. I did playlets in high school, I did radio shows in college. That's one of the reasons I went down to Second City, because you could do acting and writing.
How accurately can the law fix the crime? There has to be a mechanism for very fast action. The law is like this: catch them and punish them.
It always looks so easy to solve problems by taking the line of least resistance.
Labour is the source of every blessing.