I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?

We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.

If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.

I felt more doubtful than usual with 'Goon Squad,' because I knew that the book's genre wasn't easily named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest.

I'm a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.

Being somewhere but not completely: that was home for Danny. . . . All he needed was a cellphone or I-access, or both at once, or even just a plan to leave wherever he was and go someplace else really really soon.