Steve Erickson quotes:

When L.A.'s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.

a dream is only a memory of the future

Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."

I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them.

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

My own personal experience has become more first-hand.

Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance.

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.

In LA, you think you're making something up, but it's making you up.

Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and a more vague sense of where things may wind up, but at some point, if the novel is any good at all, the story and characters take on lives of their own and take over the book, and the writer has to be open to that.

By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.

I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.

I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.

If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.

In the end I write the novels I need to write when I need to write them.

The material dictates the approach.

The material dictates the approach. I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them. Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."

There have been times I thought that when I got a certain point in the story, a certain character was going to do a certain thing, only to get to that point and have the character make clear that he or she doesn't want to do that at all. That long phone conversation I thought the character was going to have? He hangs up the phone before the other person answers, and twenty pages of dialog I had half written in my head go out the window.

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake, and if anything I've always steered a bit clear of that kind of thing, because it seems gimmicky to play around with text rather than do the work of telling a story and creating characters.

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.