On revision:

“I think I’m doing that with a story I’m working on now. I now hate it, whereas a month ago I was really liking it. Somewhere in there, it turned. Now what do I do? Do I go back to an earlier draft? Do I just wait? I think what I need to do with that one is wait a while, until I can return to it lovingly— and hopefully take it somewhere.”

On characters without names:

“Maybe it’s just an attraction to a kind of fairy-tale storytelling—it feels like names would be slightly too specific for the story…It feels like a texture to me. The texture would go a little wrong if the character was named, if the story wants to be more mythic. As soon as someone is named, the story enters the world of reality a little more.”

On L.A.:

“It can be very introverted in L.A.; you spend so much time in your car, often by yourself, that there’s a lot of down-time. There’s a lot of daydreaming space in L.A., and in that way I think that does help my work.”

On the classics:

“I developed a prejudice in high school that it was all going to be boring. That kind of teenage, why-do-I-have-to-read-these-goddamn-classics feeling. And then you discover that the classics are classics because they’re lively. They don’t stick around because they’re boring. If they’re boring, they go away.”

Read the interview here.

Photo © 2010 Max S. Gerber via