For a fight to be productive, or at least relevant, writers should fight over different demands they put upon writing (as an individual, private act) and literature (a network of relations in which we are all involved).

Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.

I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation.

I know a lot of people in the city, at all levels, horizontally and vertically - and that to me is a privilege, to me as a person but also a writer. I've dined with billionaires, and I play soccer with busboys.

People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.

The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.

Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity