I don't want everything to be flowery perfection. I like it there to be a charge behind it, you know?

You know what it's like: you don't want to read your old books again. All you can see are the flaws, what you would do differently.

What worries me is the professionalism of everything.

When people write a novel, they want to have that reach and that impact. To get it with a first novel, you can either see it as an albatross or a calling card.

We want to feel hyper-alive, and it's like, the more cartoonish and grotesque the level we can operate at, the better. It's like the world we live in has become quite safe in a lot of ways, and it has become harder to genuinely transgress. But the desire to transgress is a real feeling.

'Ulysses' is like a big box of tricks that you can dive into. Each time you read it, you find something new.