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.

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

A lot of my close friends had tolerantly washed their hands of the whole idea of me writing a book. They had said to themselves, "I don't know what he's doing."

You are skilled. I exhort you.

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

It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand.

... people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering.