If a person wants to be of any use to himself, he better insist on getting his fair share of beauty and pleasure, and if there's something about the system that's keeping him from getting his share, then I think he's well within his rights to fight to change that.

I thought when I started writing that I'd have a book out in four or five years, and as it became apparent that that wasn't going to happen, I became increasingly frustrated and unsure of myself.

There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.

You have the mainstream bourgeois life of the U.S., Europe, the "developed" world - the life of technology, education, mortgages, careers, a certain level of physical comfort - while on the other hand, several billion people on the planet exist on less than a dollar a day. That's a huge and terrible reality to get your head around.

I think if you spend much time dwelling on influence you can get self-conscious about every line you write. That's a great way to freeze up.

I really had to decide why I was writing. I had no interest in going back to law; I very briefly - for about six hours - considered going to get my MBA, but in the end, I realized that the only work I really wanted to do was write.

From about the age of 15 or 16 I'd had the notion that I wanted to write fiction, and I'd done enough in college to satisfy myself that I had a knack for it - I wouldn't call it "talent" - though I wondered if I'd ever have the guts to actually commit to it.