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.

You are skilled. I exhort you.

Tall people have a real advantage in the world.

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

A lot of writers choose to live in New York, partly because of the literary culture here, and partly because Brooklyn's a pretty nice place to live. And a lot of writers who might not geographically reside in New York still point their ambitions towards New York in some sense.

The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.

It was strange the way he loved her; a side long and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention.