Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

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.

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

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

For people who are displaced, you can reconstruct the story of your life from the objects you have access to, but if you don't have the objects then there are holes in your life. This is why people in Bosnia - if anyone was running back into a burning house it was to salvage photos.

There is a logic [to my reading], but I can't define it. I like reading impulsively. I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I'll read them when they call me from the shelf.