To me the biggest waste of time is commuting. First, there is no place that is less than a two-hour commute from New York. You can be half a mile outside of the city limits; you're two hours away by car. I don't care how close they tell you it is. "Oh, it's only thirty miles." Thirty miles? At 8:30 in the morning, thirty miles outside New York, you might as well be starting out in Omaha.

What's the point of being young if you're not going to make new things, I wonder?

there are two kinds of music - good music and bad music. Good music is music that I want to hear. Bad music is music that I don't want to hear.

In conversation you can use timing, a look, an inflection. But on the page all you have is commas, dashes, the amount of syllables in a word. When I write, I read everything out loud to get the right rhythm.

When I'm supposed to be writing I clean my apartment, take my clothes to the laundry, get organized, make lists, do the dishes. I would never do a dish unless I had to write.

My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature, I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish.

I stopped taking drugs when I was 19, and who wants to drive a cab around New York with drugs in their car?