I make up stories that take place in real space with real people. If I could convert this into a technique for experimental novels, I might really be onto something.

There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.

I don't like to say, "Oh, I don't like this kind of music." I like to listen to it and try to see what people who like it get out of it.

It's hard always to say what it is one likes about a place, for me. I feel it.

You always feel like your 18-year-old self in some sense. And that's what walking through New York on a June evening feels like - you feel like it's Friday and you're 17 years old.

I don't understand being idle; I don't have an idle setting. I probably should develop one.

Over the past 40 years, the tradition of Southern progressivism has been somewhat successfully erased by right-wing revisionist historians.