Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.

Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work.

Looking at and shaping your own work is a very intuitive process. You see something you've written in your notebook. It's there on the page and either feels right or it doesn't, and it's hard sometimes to go beyond that and discover why it feels that way.

Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.

You don't have to even see the common man anymore if you don't want to! Only through the telescope on your yacht.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

I play American football every Saturday, which I find calming.