Outsider means "I will accept the possibility that I don't have responsibility for what is happening inside my domain."

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

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

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.

Chicago is not a bad place to live. But the usual story of immigration is the happy fulfillment of human potential in America that is not available anywhere else - it's propaganda, really. It's more complicated than that.

What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.

For a fight to be productive, or at least relevant, writers should fight over different demands they put upon writing (as an individual, private act) and literature (a network of relations in which we are all involved).