I believe people are much more complicated than they can handle.

The balls do not make a writer.

I've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I've always followed his work and loved it.

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 like to blow up this notion that all we have to do as writers and artists is represent reality, which is presumably solid and self-evident, with no negotiation of the gap between myself and the world, between this body and this space, which needs narration to close it.

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.

Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle."