I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

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

Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

In the olden days, a memoir was something written by Churchill and people like that, because they had a grand experience and considered it useful for future generations. And then it became what it became - a public purging in which other people have the chance to judge you and then forgive you, perhaps learning something from your sorry example.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.