I was like a well trained pianist who knows which note to hit, but can't make the music his own.

I'm just not a natural teacher.

A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.

'Breaking Bad.' Because it's the best American narrative fiction of the last ten years.

‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.

It is actually a lot harder to sit down and write from A to Z. But for me at least, it's the only way I can do it, at this point, with any moderate success.

This wasn't the way I had imagined my adventures, but reality ignored my wishes from the get-go, giving me a body best suited for stacking books in the library, injecting so much fear into my veins that I could only cower in the stairwell when the violence came. Maybe someday my arms and legs would thicken with muscle and the fear would drain away like dirty bathwater. I wish I believed these things would happen, but I didn't.