New York Is The Hollywood

When I Was Young, I Was All About Personal Sovereignty And That Junk, Because There Was No Privacy And The Available Ideologies Were Collective, Both Socialism/communism And Nationalism.

I Know A Lot Of People In The City, At All Levels, Horizontally And Vertically - And That To Me Is A Privilege, To Me As A Person But Also A Writer. I've Dined With Billionaires, And I Play Soccer With Busboys.

We Hated Pretentiousness; It Was A Form Of Self-hatred.

I Started Appreciating And Valuing Different Things. Some Things Just Became Insufferable To Me, And Not Just Literature. I Used To Like Horror Movies And Now I Couldn't Stand Them.

Europe Is A Rapidly Changing Place, On Every Level. Immigration, Post-communist Transitions, The Unification, Steady Presence Of War And Conflict, The Inescapable Challenges To The Notion Of National Literature/culture-it All Exerts Pressure Upon Writers Who Must Be Aware Of The Transformational Possibilities Of The Situation.