I always lived in old buildings, and I thought about who lived here before. You'd have to be oblivious not to.

I think Jewish history did away with a priesthood when the Temple was destroyed, and it became, supposedly, a religion of scholars. A rabbi is just a scholar.

I live in an apartment building built in 1925, and it hasn't been heavily renovated, so I feel very much connected to that time and what went on in that place.

I'm very interested in music and where these sounds of Western music come from.

I think a lot of these terms, nationalistic things, somebody is an American, or somebody is a Frenchman, or somebody is a Jew, I don't know, it doesn't mean anything to me. You really should start augmenting these words, saying what kind. If you want to say somebody is a Jew, what do you mean by that? Does he have blonde hair? I think a lot of these ancient nationalistic and ethnic terms have kind of lost their meaning, or their meaning is so broad, it's nothing. It's like he's connected to the ancient world. Everybody is.

Really interesting novels, they always are so demanding of you on some level that you don't fall asleep.

The funny thing is, nationalism only could have come about in Europe after the invention of printing. You could have this thing that was a book in a vernacular language, and you could imagine there were other readers of this book who you couldn't see, but they were a theoretical union of readers who all use the same language. That is kind of a prerequisite for a national fantasy. You need that thing, and it's a strange thing.