In a lot of ways, being a writer is a lousy job - grueling, emotionally taxing, terrible hours, no health care - so if it wasn't about love, what would be the point?

When you invent something, you're drawing on reservoirs of knowledge that you already have. It's only when you're faithful to the truth that something can come to you from the outside.

There are ideas it will be easy to say in the future that we just don't have the language for now.

When a novelist manages to describe or evoke something you thought or felt, without realizing that other people also found themselves in the same situation and had the same feelings, it creates that same solidarity. Maybe it's better to think of humor not as a tool to express the solidarity, but a kind of by-product. Maybe the realization "I'm not on my own on this one" is always, or often, funny.

There is salvation - happiness and virtue - in beauty. I would define beauty in this context as a kind of richness, complexity, mystery, diversity, otherness, and unexpectedness - something that comes from the outside.

Obviously there are many, many ways of being an outsider, but having immigrant parents is one of them. For one thing, it makes you a translator: there are all kinds of things that American parents know about life in America ,and about being a kid in America, that non-American parents don't know, and in many cases it falls on the kid to tell them, and also to field questions from Americans about their parents' native country.

I don't think anything can substitute long talks, and long talks are somehow never as easy to schedule again as they were in school, when most people - at least in my little socioeconomic corner of the world - live not with their families or sexual partners, but with same-sex friends. I really miss that from college. I never really thought at the time about how things would never be that way again.