Catch me, as if I have surely been out committing a violation against you, my sin of insisting on existing without you.

As time has gone on and we're at the end of the 20th century and major publishing is a big business, yes, of course we're going to get a lot of plain, mediocre trash. There are a lot of writers who get huge advances for books that don't go anywhere and they have to burn them somewhere or throw them away. I always think about all the poor trees that have been sacrificed.

There’s something insupportable about being pissed with the one person on this planet that sends your adrenaline flowing to remind you that you’re alive. It’s almost like we’re mad because we’ve been shocked out of our usual comatose state of being by feeling something for someone, for ourselves, for just a moment.

Paris, true to its promise, had been a place of civilized indecencies, or uncivil decencies.

Between the sun and poverty there was us for a little while.

I've spent my whole life in Chicago being asked where am I from, so that I have a sense of displacement that also is very psychologically disorienting.

Mexico. Melancholy, profoundly right and wrong, it embraces as it strangulates.