In Conversation

My process almost always begins with a camera, but I’m not really a photographer. I have always been more interested in the noise around a photograph. All of the subliminal things happening around the moment of photographing that don’t make it into the image…

A: We’re French, we had to put wine in the story. And so life had champagne parties.
B: Well, a party without champagne…
A: —Is a war without weapons. You know, if I was younger, we’d have had a great passionate affair for two years and been friends the rest of our lives. I can tell you that frankly. That said, if you violate my airspace, there will not be a funeral!

What an amazing and weird piece it must have been. Six live snakes, strung up from the pipes of some loft space, played five custom string instruments made of wood. Each snake had a soft white collar around its head and tail, and string was tied to each of these collars; the top string led to the roof, the bottom string to the instrument…

A: What if I believe in this, just because it is beautiful?
B: One should not try so crudely to make everything suit their interests, calling the same thing white today and black tomorrow.

It’s like walking down the street and seeing someone fall over—we react to that because it’s another body in space, like our own body in space…

A: Didn’t mind so much if it was inaccurate.
B: People didn’t mind so much if it was inaccurate? Well, they need some basic plumbing lessons. And they have clearly lost all human morality. They’re setting fire to the future… There is no greater freedom than the right to survive.
A: Listen, I hear you: Muenster is Muenster, no matter how you slice it.

I’ve long felt that reality is so strange that realism really isn’t up to the task of adequately presenting it. The world is a whole lot more horrible than I imagined as a child. But it is also considerably funnier. I try to make do with that…

A: The smell of blood was in the air, and there were lots of people crying…
B: It’s an issue for sure…
A: I was forced to yell. The world cannot just allow this to happen. I had no other weapon to resort to, no other means to resort to, but to speak publicly and get attention that way.
B: You, sir, were not even truthy.

I wanted my characters to be able to argue about undeath without ever having to actually run from or fend off the undead… Since the characters don’t feel threatened by the undead, their conversations are free to shift away from the apocalyptic logistics of most zombie fiction (‘How do we survive?’ ‘How do we kill them?’ ‘How do we know who’s been bitten?’) to a more passive fascination with zombies’ creatureliness (‘What do they remember?’ ‘Are they conscious?’ ‘What is it like to be them?’).

In the nuclear age, Constitutions have been belittled and deformed by having their war provisions ignored. So, too, social contract theory has been set aside in the nuclear age. One of the leading theorists of peace, Thomas Hobbes has been turned upside down into an apologist for executive war making…

My parents and I had come back to Romania after being deported to the concentration camp in Transnistria. It was a time of extraordinary and sudden joy, rediscovering what I call the banality of life, the very basic things: food, clothes, school, especially.,,

Better to refer to character as fixation, maybe, a knotty impulse. Distortion. Exaggeration. A simplification. Clarissa is going to have her party and Anse wants his goddamn teeth…

Gregory Crewdson, an American artist renown for his elaborately staged photographs of small-town life, digs into the commonplace and familiar to find images that are haunting, surreal and—most agree—profoundly unnerving.