I've always felt like my nose is pressed to glass. I always feel a little bit like an outsider.

My journals were a clearing house - a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn't belong in my work.

Let me tell you something about hypochondria: It's a pernicious, undermining little demon. It won't kill you, but it will sap the color from your life so that in the loveliest moments, the moments of grace, you are hit with that whisper in your ear that takes it all away. I'm sick, I'm dying - I just don't know it yet.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

I remember getting my first cell phone in New York, getting into a taxi and thinking "This is the end of solitude in the back of a taxi." What used to happen in the back of a taxi? You looked out the window. My brain has become less able to spend lengths of time without shifting, and I worry about that.

I don't want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don't want to wish the present moment away.

I'm very disciplined, but the one thing that I have addictive behavior about is the Internet.