You don't want to be that parent - the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks - especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town.

Even if something within me is ugly, writing is a pretty good place to play with that thing and to begin to really see it.

Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.

Back in 1992, I had my first story accepted by 'The New Yorker.'

I'm a control freak. I'm defensive. And I'm an egomaniac. That's true about me.

That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

If you want to explore a political idea in the highest possible way, you embody it in the personal, because that's something that no one can deny.