[...] how much literary fiction deals with the absolute power that the rest of the planet lives under? It's almost none. But if you read any science fiction or fantasy, there's always a dark lord or a dark side or an emperor. It's always wrestling with this incredible power. The anxieties of the rest of our lived experience are only expressed in the genres. It's the same way that our terror of abjection, our terror of our flimsy bodies, those only find real expression in horror. And yet all of these things are exiled from what we call literary tradition, and because of that, in literary fiction, we have a very attenuated sense of what we call the 'real'. [...]

[...] it's the difference between having an American passport and deciding you're going to live in Paraguay versus having a Paraguayan passport. If you're a high literary writer you can live there your whole life, but you have that fucking passport. Even if you never go home, the possibility of it determines all your choices, all your privilege, and that's a difficult thing for people to embrace and to think about.