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

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.

I'd like to have the kind of house someday where a carousel horse wouldn't be out of place in the living room.

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.

Delia's arms were inscribed with a grid of self- inflicted wounds, an intricate text of self-loathing

A modest critique of an age in which an actor is the President, in which fashion models are asked for their opinions, in which getting into a nightclub is seen as a significant human achievement.