If you're part of any kind of writerly community, some of those people will have gone through MFA programs, and their thinking leaks into yours. So whatever changes MFAs have made to the culture, it's to the culture as a whole. It can't be pinned down to individual books in a way that some people would like to do.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

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.

It's very hard right now to be a pro sports fan. The economics of this stuff is abysmal.

I feel like every time I start up, it's like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go.

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

For me, the process always has to be pretty intense. I could never write just two or three days a week. It had to be every day.