I felt like I had to earn the right to write this book, and the only way I could do that was by working very hard to imagine myself into the soldier's experience, and hopefully write it correctly.

We’ve come a long way since George Eliot had to call herself George Eliot, but you’d have to be blind to think we live in an equal world.

And if a book this good was consigned to XLibris, it meant one (or more) of three things. 1) Literary trade publishing was more gravely ill than I’d imagined; 2) My judgment was way off-base (always a possibility), or 3) There was some piece of this story I was still missing.

The career of a writer is always an exception. There is never one way it happens, but the temptation to draw conclusions from another writer's experience is always there.

I think songs are really great, kind of, delivery vehicles for a story. They allow you to make your own conclusions. Good songs never give you everything. So I really believe a song is like an envelope. A novel, you can unfold from a song.

I write my texts, my sentences, in my head — outside there is a terrible, almost unbearable noise, inside there is a terrible, almost unbearable, pounding silence.

Considered by many to be Portugal’s greatest living writer, António Lobo Antunes’ relative obscurity in the English-speaking world is something of an enigma. Every October his name is among those bandied about for the Nobel Prize, yet mention him to most English speakers, even literary types, and you will be met with terribly blank looks.

Fiction that aspires to be something more than an entertainment commodity must, I think, ultimately be concerned with its own longevity, with the conversation it holds between itself and whatever has preceded it.

I am in love with the gorgeous, elastic, leaping human brain that shuffles and connects disparate pieces of the world into a coherent story.

I’m surprised to hear that you communists overseas are using your own individual sharpeners in classrooms. It’s a very Ayn-Randian position to take. “I’ve got my pencil sharpener, fuck you if you can’t afford a pencil sharpener! Sharpen your pencil with your bootstrap!”

I was hellbent on writing stories that took place anywhere but where I grew up. I wrote stories set in the swanky social circles of Manhattan, or pieces set in Hawaii or Texas or the underbelly of LA or even, God forgive me, stories set nowhere... I thought that most people wouldn't find where I was from interesting enough.

People are made by the books they read and I think I am finished. That is to say, my making is finished.

You can still make books where stuff happens. I don’t think you necessarily have to be some kind of high postmodernist and refuse any kind of stability of meaning. One way I’ve found is through the use of silence and the use of incompleteness, because that demands a kind of active reading. It demands something from the reader -- a kind of collusion with the writer.

Readers, have you seen any good interrobangs lately? I sat down with Penny Speckter, the 92-year-old widow of the mark’s creator, to talk about her memories of her husband, his passion for typography, and about her own experiences as a woman working in the heady world of advertising during the Mad Men era.

If you fall in love with your subject, you can so identify with your subject that you lose something of your own self to it. The first two biographers of Malcolm Lowry who was a suicide, they both killed themselves. Maybe they had that inclination to begin with. But that can happen.

Anyone who believes that you can make art from language is part of a small, nearly-vanishing community, and we should all form a wedge and march on the enemy. Do we need different uniforms in this struggle, different stripes on our arms so that it’s clear who the realists are? Maybe, but I care less and less.

While evil is obviously universal, various forms of evil portrayed in The Uninnocent do seem to me to be distinctly American. An unstable idealism that sometimes erupts into irrevocable acts of violence or crime does reside in the hearts of many of these characters.