I always thought of my work as being animated by a spirit of unhinged generosity.

Sometimes I think my purpose is as a saboteur when I'm working with other people, derailing what they're trying to do or taking things to a ludicrous extremity.

My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.

When I started, I wanted to be thought of as tortured and seductive, not funny, but humor tends to be a reflexive part of a person's sensibility. It's an almost impossible thing to teach anyone, which leads me to believe that it's intuitive.

I don't walk around chuckling all the time. My outlook is very bleak. It's worse than bleak, it's apocalyptic.

People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.