You know, Im always surprised when I read profiles, and they make me sound so jaded. I am so not jaded.

Bottles of wine aren't like paintings. At some point you have to consume them. The object in life is to die with no bottles of wine in your cellar. To drink your last bottle of wine and go to sleep that night and not wake up.

Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.

There is a type of writer that can happily bury themselves in the country and dig very deep, but I'm not like that.

I think it's dangerous to think you know what you're writing. I usually don't know, and usually I just discover it in the course of writing. I envy those writers who can outline a beginning, a middle, and end. Fitzgerald supposedly did it. John Irving does. Bret Easton Ellis does. But for me, the writing itself is the process of discovery. I can't see all that far ahead.

Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.

Sometimes I think everything I touch turns into a Page Six item.