Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

In a democracy in the 20th and 21st century, if you can't base your fiction upon ordinary people and the issues that engage them, then you are reduced to writing about spectacular unreal people. You know, James Bond or something, and you cook up adventures.

Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.

I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.