[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.

When I am near the end of a book, I have to sleep in the same room with it.

I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere

I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right.

If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

I was in love with New York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.