Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.

I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.

...morning is the soul's night.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

There's a certain kind of neurological makeup that goes along with being a writer, and having been in the room with a few other writers at the same time, it's rather wearing to be around. And it does - there is a kind of hypervigilance about it. Unfortunately it's got disadvantages. If you turn that hypervigilance on yourself and, for instance, whether or not you have a pimple on the end of your nose, it can get really depressing.

every failure is also a victory.

No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.