I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

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

What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing; it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.

I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.

I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.

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