Luckily for you, you can close the book The Postman Always Rings Twice and break out of it, and James M. Cain can't. I can't think of any redeeming feature he has, but he's extremely compelling.

New York is ultimately not the synthesis but merely the sum of its unfathomable subjectivities, its personal histories, its uncategorisable figures.

Another big moment in terms of that feeling was David Petraeus: if the director of the CIA can't get away with having a secret relationship, then what hope do you have? It's not really an original idea, but there's something that goes along with power and celebrity that starts to make you feel like you're impervious to certain forces that the rest of us have to live with.

Luckily for you, you can close the book The Postman Always Rings Twice and break out of it, and James M. Cain can't. I can't think of any redeeming feature he has, but he's extremely compelling.

The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence. When you're handwriting, you really just have to move on.

Those who know New York City primarily through tourism or mass culture may think of us natives as possessing certain shared characteristics, not all of them flattering. But the true, volatile charisma of New York lies in how balkanised it is.

I seem to have a talent for writing endings that seem just right to me but that frustrate other people.