More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.

I hesitate to say yes - I had writer's block, because I know there are people who've had really serious cases of it, and I've never been paralyzed like that, but I definitely get blocked sometimes. More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.

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

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

I once saw John Updike get in front of a crowd and read a story that he'd written in 1958, and I just thought, I can't even look at stuff I wrote a year ago, I can't believe he's doing this.

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.