When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don't have an audience; I have a set of standards.

Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity's reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity.

Freud is finished, Einstein's next.

I am very unmusical. I can't carry a tune. I would never be able to play an instrument.

I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.

Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.

I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.