One of the reasons so many nonfiction books are so boring is because what they've done, very diligently, is fulfill the terms of their proposals. They've written up their proposal, long-form, and often what this does is then set up a sort of serial deal, where the whole book can essentially be reduced back to the size of the original proposal!

Foreign governments are going to be poring through all these Donald Trump tweets looking for - to try and discern what it means for foreign policy.

The ideal is to feel at home anywhere, everywhere.

He [Thelonious Monk] played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to.

There's something about New York. You can get a nice feeling of belonging as a writer here. It's probably the best city on Earth like that. I miss the wisecracking of New York.

I would hope that nothing that I write would ever seem earnest because I subscribe absolutely to Franz Nietzsche's claim when he says, "Ah, earnestness, the sure sign of a slow mind." Earnest people are always a bit on the thick side in my experience.

In foreign countries, when people see what Donald Trump is saying on Twitter since the election and seeing what he's saying in these calls with foreign leaders, they take everything very seriously and they take everything very literally.