I don't just want my books to be about the '30s and '40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as '40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.

One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.

If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.

I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.

I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.

Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying

If you're a writer, you're always working.