MARK LEYNER

I can tell from about 20 yards away when someone has a manuscript for me. I can just tell - they have that look.

I thought of myself as kind of an anarchist all my whole adult life, from the days when I was 15 or 16.

The interesting thing about something in the back of your mind is that it can travel pretty far back in your mind.

I always thought of my work as being animated by a spirit of unhinged generosity.

Sometimes I think my purpose is as a saboteur when I'm working with other people, derailing what they're trying to do or taking things to a ludicrous extremity.

My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.

I think to simply make fun of something isn't particularly interesting. I try to not just do a parody of something or belittle something or disparage something.

As far as what I do, my value as a writer is certainly not to try to recapitulate a 19th century form. Certain styles of narrative don't conform to my style of experiencing the world.

People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.

I don't walk around chuckling all the time. My outlook is very bleak. It's worse than bleak, it's apocalyptic.

'Et Tu, Babe' was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing; it's my whole life.

When I started, I wanted to be thought of as tortured and seductive, not funny, but humor tends to be a reflexive part of a person's sensibility. It's an almost impossible thing to teach anyone, which leads me to believe that it's intuitive.

My work generally tends to be an all-out, 360-degree subversive take on everything, most of all my own notion of myself as a son, father, husband, human being and male in this culture.

You are fiercely heterosexual and well-formed, and it's no one's business that you've shrunk your parents and keep them in a terranium, but you have a gatling gun for a mouth, and if that's a diary you're producing from your cleavage, I'm leaving.

I'm in that very preliminary stage of wondering how exactly to "pressurize" the novel in some way I've never considered before.

I think I'm a shy, self-conscious person who thinks he's being looked at and tries to look okay. Not in a hottie, narcissistic way necessarily.

I've always wanted to be a poet at the beginning. I would look at my grandparents' books and my parents' books. And in my family, a typical aspirational Jewish family, being a writer was very much exalted, and it seemed impossible to me, that I could ever do something like that.

I think people got in touch with me either knowing my work, or probably more frequently just knowing a plot or sort of buzz about something I did and sort of saying, "Get that guy that writes the crazy stuff in here."

I've always been entranced with theater.

I have an enduring, very robust infatuation with dictators. I have an infatuation with Stalin, Mao, and Mussolini. In the Paris Review interview I did (in 2013), I said my next book, this one, was going to be about Mussolini. I wound up only having a Mussolini cameo in the book.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

When you are a child, you often stare too closely at the wrong thing. I remember the first time I was taken to Yankee Stadium. Someone had spilled something sweet earlier in the day and the ground was covered with ants. I spent the whole game staring at the ants, and that was more fascinating than the game.

I'm fascinated with video games, though I can't really play them. It's definitely an art form that intrigues me to no end, though.

Actually what's worse than a dog's mouth is a cat's mouth. They're not dirtier per se, but they have sharper teeth, so they are much more likely to go deep, should they bite you.

I think as I have gotten older, my feelings about my role in the culture as a writer, and me specifically, has changed, and has become more degraded and marginalized. This may be a more personal and psychological than a sociological insight, but I feel more vulnerable.