"Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth."
"I don't like real places, but I don't like imagined ones either. I feel like I'm looking for some mixture and it's very hard for me to say because I like to use real place names because there's an uncanny feeling to them, but at the same time I don't ever really try to make them plausible. Sometimes I like to use them as a way to hide in plain sight a little bit, because to me a very exotic or imagined setting has a lot of weight and a lot of burden to it, and it doesn't suit me, but a real place seems to have its own weird legacy, so I don't know what the choice is?"
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Source: This week in fiction:Ben Marcus by Deborah Treisman, www.newyorker.com. May 11, 2013.
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