But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.

You used to be able to tell a person's nationality by the face. Immigration ended that. Next you discerned nationality via the footwear. Globalization ended that.

You begin always knowing nothing. You remain forever an amateur, a first timer.

But in the end it wasn't up to me. The bigs things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we're born.

I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.

People don't save other people. People save themselves.