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

It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time.

The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.

We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.

I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.

Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she's already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat.

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