Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

If you're being attacked from all sides, it's possible you're doing something right; it's also possible that you are doing everything wrong.

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

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet.

Writing doesn't come easily to anyone, I think, certainly not to me. But pressure and practice does lend a certain fluency, I think - the more sentences you write, the more sentences you have written, if that slightly Zen confection makes any sense.

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.