“Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.”

Just in case God isn’t dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.

Maybe that’s the way I’m private – I respect the privacy of “my” characters? Anyway, we’re getting close to the whole “relatability” and “likability” thing.

Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. “Ari” appears on the edge of this book a couple of times – but on the edge, she’s never in it, even if she’s a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.

I’m defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

I don’t think “I’m going to publish this as fiction” but I think “I’m going to tell this story to a friend” and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it’s already happened.

Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

Maybe now if you’re not an exhibitionist you’re private. Or maybe it’s just that for a lot of people – sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways – there’s no division between the art object and what surrounds it.

I like to think – knowing that it’s an enabling fiction – of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn’t the only measure of value.

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass “conceptualism” that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.

I usually see the word “metafiction” applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.

My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.

I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature’s ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.

I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life’s white machine.

Sleepwalking down the hall like a firefly in the fog.

I remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and put that under our eyes. So our faces were glowing – a kind of night vision.

You know what the chain of command is? It’s the chain I go get and beat ya with until you realize who’s in ruttin’ command here!

Precise, graceful, and generous, the poems in SuperLoop, seem to be born out of a deep, careful attention and a profound compassion.

Sometimes the quiet observer, sometimes the kid in the center of the messed-up carnival, these poems are the fireflies you’ve missed all winter

Women have in their natures something akin to owls and fireflies. While men grow stupid and sleepy towards evening, they become brighter and more open-eyed, and show a propensity to flit and sparkle under the light of chandeliers.

I love Prospect Park-watching fireflies at night and going to the bandshell for free music.

Be a firefly in the world of fake butterflies.