The Declaration of Independence is that sacred American text so full of meaning and purpose and yet quite empty if you examine it and pull it apart because the words "All Men" exclude a vast number of citizens.

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

I think each book has its own way of accommodating my concerns, whether it's about race, America, technology, the city.

Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?

I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city what we would never allow to be done to ourselves. . . . New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.