If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.

It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

Stories are consoling, fiction is one of the consolation prizes for having lived in the world.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.

Perhaps we've invented conspiracies for our own psychic well-being, to heal ourselves.