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.

I don't want to have my life fall apart for my work.

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.

My former wife is a very eccentric woman, which is why I still love her.

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

I realized that I might not ever make it as a writer, that it might be because I wasn't good enough, or that it might be because the odds were just too long.

Your presence here is is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren’t.