On the whole, I don't want to think too much about why I write what I write. If I know what I'm doing ... I can't do it.

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.

I do have a strong sense of an order in the universe.

I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape

We are the stories we tell ourselves

There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.