I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

I don't think that everyone should have a philosophical answer to any given question. There are things that need to be done.

My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.

A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.

It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time.

There's a social and human necessity for some kind of continuity, but it's not axiomatic and not something you're born into; it's something you have to work at. And one of the ways to work at it - perhaps the best - is storytelling: telling stories about yourself to others, telling stories about yourself to yourself, telling stories about others to others.

Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.