In America, when you hear about the Underground Railroad, it's so evocative. You think it's a literal subway for a few minutes before your teacher goes on and describes where it actually was.
I'm not a representative of blackness, and I'm not a healer.
Access to information, to music or any kind of culture, is getting faster and faster and more streamlined. At each juncture, people are thrown into tumult and have to adapt or die.
Most of my books have always worked through juxtaposition, jumping through different point of views and time.
Once I got to college, it seemed that the Hamptons were a little bit too posh for me and didn't represent the kind of values I was embracing in my late teens. So, I didn't go out there, except to visit my parents, for a long time. And then, after 9/11, I discovered it was a nice, mellow place to hang out.
A lot of early Misfits song titles are inspired by old B-movies, which were my Popeye's spinach when I was a kid.
In '82 and '83, that was the rise of the VCR. Every Friday, my brother and I would go to Crazy Eddie's - which was a video store in Manhattan - and rent five horror movies. And that's basically what we did, basically, for three years. Becoming social misfits.
Usually, when I write a novel, it takes me about 100 pages to figure out the voice of the narrator.
The terror of figuring out a new genre, of telling a new story, is what makes the job exciting, keeps me from getting bored, and I assume it keeps whoever follows my work from getting bored as well.
The readership for 'Sag Harbor' was different from people who'd read me before - it was linear and realistic, not as strange as 'The Intuitionist.' Did they carry over to 'Zone One,' a story about zombies in New York? Some, some not. I'm used to people not caring about my other books.
Zombies are a great rhetorical prop to talk about people and paranoia, and they are a good vehicle for my misanthropy.
If you go to a big publishing house, editorial aside, it's completely white.
I don't generally follow sports. At an early age, I discovered that nature had apportioned me only a small reserve of enthusiasm. Best to ration.
I live in Brooklyn. I moved here 14 years ago for the cheap rent. It was a little embarrassing because I was raised in Manhattan, and so I was a bit of a snob about the other boroughs.
I take inspiration from books, movies, television, music - it all goes in the hopper. Depending on the project, I'm drawing from this or that piece of art that has stayed with me. Toni Morrison, George Romero, Sonic Youth - they are all in there.
There's always an attack on the sophomore novel from some quarters.
'John Henry Days' was already half in the can before my first book came out, so I'd already started something that was big and sprawling - I just had to finish it.
I'm raising kids, and so much of American culture sustains me and gives me things to think about and work on.
I like questions that tee me up to make weird jokes, frankly.
I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it's like to be a writer in Brooklyn. I expect it's like writing in Manhattan, but there aren't as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. It's like writing in Paris, but there are fewer people speaking French.
