Paul Park

“We all have strategies to distract ourselves from what we cannot bear. Memory, for example, serves such a function.”

“Modernist fiction is tied to problems of writers. Self-glorifying. Existential struggle. This has not been a big part of genre writing.”

“Every character in a story, I thought when I had folded up the phone, has both a purpose and a secret purpose.”

“I think it's no coincidence that people who are good at writing far-out fiction are also good at meta-fiction. Think of all the best Phillip K. Dick stories, where you experience a sort of dislocation, and suddenly what you think you've been reading is, in fact, something else entirely.”

“Meta-fiction doesn't depend on the illusion that you're reading about real people.”

“Sometimes, a writer 'character' is just a projection of a person who is writing the story, but not necessarily 'me.'”