His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.

I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.

I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.

It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.