It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely characters from stories about the past, never again unreadable, no misunderstandings possible, the pain coming from them stable and manageable. nor do you have to explain yourself to them, to justify the fact of your life.

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.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

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

The people who listened to rock 'n' roll, I thought, were bound together against the people who didn't listen to rock 'n' roll. That, of course, didn't work at all. Your taste in rock 'n' roll does not say anything about you, morally or otherwise.

There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.