New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it.

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.