I think, when I'm writing, I have a more clinical view than I do when I'm reading. I like pretending to be God and basically determining the fate of my characters. But as a reader, I'm a sucker. I'm very sentimental. I get upset when people that I like die. And yet I have killed off characters in my books quite heartlessly, and sometimes found that readers were very upset by it.

I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.

Taste ... is a matter of taste (Tad Allagash)

I like the fact that I'm living in the world rather than in a university.

What I'm nostalgic for is the idea of an edge in New York. There used to be these fringes of the city where civilization sort of ended, and therefore young people could live cheaply, or open nightclubs or art galleries, or even squat. That fringe moved out to New Jersey and Brooklyn. The whole idea of the metropolis is the centralization of like-minded souls, and when the central real estate becomes too expensive, the dreamers, the young poets, and the artists will go elsewhere.

We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published.

There's a socialist bias to the consensus of the literary world: a '30s mentality that says factory workers are more worthy of our attention.