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

I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

Memory narrativises itself.

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.

Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere?

The balls do not make a writer.