No one I interact with - except maybe for family and strangers at the Russian baths and other weird places I may go to - is just friends or lovers with me: they also know something of my writing and this distorts their take on me.

Whenever I wrote fiction, people always seemed to think that what I wrote was true, that it was entirely autobiographical. And when I would write non-fiction, they often accused me of exaggeration and fictionalization.

I hid my underwear beneath a parked Peugeot.

Something has happened where you almost never grow up in America. Maybe it's the greater wealth.

The reason it's hard for me to tweet is I don't want to pronounce anything, and Twitter is for pronouncing.

I've always been inspired by Don Quixote as a role model of sorts, of the power of books to sort of make you insane in maybe a beautiful way.

For me, the past is dead. Can't go back.