I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.

Yeah, I mean, I put work out there for people to use and I'm grateful when you use it.

I found my voice was a reaction to all that voice stuff.

I'm really fascinated and you know I've been wondering about that usage of language, various breathing techniques and why in these practices language is being used in another way.

One of the reasons I think the ultra right-wing has such power in this country is that no one talks out.

We've been very bad at understanding why the right-wing does things.

There's a backlash against womyn that's really bad right now.

Traveling around I don't think people are that horrible, I think they just don't know.

Some of the stuff about Yogi energy is really fascinating.

Well, I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing.

I think the best thing in cases of censorship or things like this is to get as much media as possible.

I mean, once work's out there it's meant to be used.

I'm very staid compared to my students, actually.

I might be writing what people expect me to write, writing from that place where I might be ruled by economic considerations. To overcome that, I started working with my dreams, because I'm not so censored when I use dream material.

I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists.

We get on the bandwagon in all sorts of ways - you know minor ways and major ways - like what you've just encountered which isn't censorship exactly, it was something sort of uglier in a way.

And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation.

I write it to get it out of me. I don't write it to remember it.

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.

And internalization is used in this country as a very effective political tool.

I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.

But I still don't have a clear idea of what my voice is.

I mean, they censor your work when they're scared of it.

Well, fear and homophobia are both pervasive.

That's what the right-wing is good at: figuring out the left wing.

The literary culture, if you examine it, the high literary culture is that which preserves the government and you know it's really the talk for those who have.

But guys such as Allen and William are more supportive than most men.

I think what we have in this country is a little more dangerous in a way because it can't be seen fully. It's sorta internal censorship. We censor each other.

On the surface we all act like we all love each other and we're free and easy, and actually we're far more moralistic than any other society I've ever lived in.

I think it's really important to find out why people hurt you or try to oppose you or whatever.

I wasn't really into body piercings until I found that about half my female students had them.

You can do whatever you want with my work.

You know I've had work banned.

Dreams are manifestations of identities.

Whereas the slums in Hamburg are the slums of its sailors Berlin is a big slum.

I find waiting unbearable because it makes me passive and negates me. I hate being nothing.

I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating.

The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week.

The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.

I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.