The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

I think that we're always drawn - particularly sophisticated people - are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

New York has always been a place where it is possible to have memories without the experience that conventionally precede them.

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist...