“I believe that people are what happened to their grandparents.” — Deborah Eisenberg

I suppose I'm always looking for a sort of acuity of perception either in my characters or about my characters.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

It's a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily.

It's certainly possible to write fiction that isn't trivial and isn't what people would call political, but it is very hard to figure out how, because our ordinary lives have such a strong tincture now of the whole world.