I think about the story while I think about other things. This is an important part of the process: I look at it sideways. If I look straight at it, it produces nothing other than what seem like complicated, brilliant designs that fall apart the following morning. In some way stories mature when you're not looking.

If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.

I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.

I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.

We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.

It's difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.

I'm bright, but there are lots of bright writers and people everywhere. In no way, at no point do I think I'm better than them.