I would agree on the aging thing. Because, at a certain point, once you start noticing it, it is your subject. And I know young that people, when they get to 30, say, "Oh, I'm so old." But actually, around 50, you do become conscious of it.

I like these nonfiction books where everything that is interesting about them is lost in that catch-all description of their "about"-ness.

Nicholson Baker talks about the way in which the most successful nonfiction books are those that can be boiled down into an argument so that everybody can wade in with an opinion without having to undergo the inconvenience of having to read the book itself. The more you can condense it, the better.

What I'm really interested in, as a reader and as a writer, is the idea of the nonfiction book that is not defined by its content, by its "about"-ness. Where you read it irrespective of whether you're interested in the subject.

I'd have no rituals, but I'm a person of compulsive habit. That's just some awful residue of a ritual. And one of the reasons for that is my living this life, which is otherwise so free of obligations. It's not at all unusual for anybody who's independently employed to crave a way of living whereby they create the structures without which their lives would otherwise start slopping around all over the place.

People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories.

[William] Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation.