We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do that.

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.

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

The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.

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.

You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.

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